


I go where I love and where I am loved (into the snow)

by lbmisscharlie



Series: Still the Walls Do Not Fall [3]
Category: Captain America (Movies)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Gender Changes, Catholic Steve Rogers, Embodiments and performances of belonging, Embodiments and performances of gender, Embodiments and performances of identity, F/F, Female Bucky Barnes, Female Steve Rogers, Found Family, Gender Identity, Genderqueer Bucky Barnes, Genderqueer Character, Identity Issues, Identity liminality, Jewish Bucky Barnes, Slow Burn, Wartime, Wartime Trauma, and one's relationship with one's body, finding one's place in the world, spirituality
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-09-19
Updated: 2017-12-18
Packaged: 2018-12-30 01:09:59
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 14
Words: 99,568
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12097410
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lbmisscharlie/pseuds/lbmisscharlie
Summary: “If they let you, will you stay?” Steve says, and Bucky had figured they’d dance around it, so she’s surprised for a minute at Steve’s matter-of-fact tone.“Will you?” she says, instead of answering. In the darkness, Steve’s face is mostly shadow. “Well, I’ve gone to all this trouble,” Bucky says. They’re close enough that she can feel the huff of Steve’s exhale.“Yeah,” Steve says. “Yeah, me too.”As the world tears itself apart, Steve and Bucky find places within it.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Hello and welcome to the "final" story of the Into the Fall Trilogy (ahem). This has been just about a year in the making, so my many thanks to those of you who have been patiently waiting! I'll be updating weekly on Tuesdays. If you missed it, I also posted an au-of-an-au story featuring Steve/Peggy, [Wear them, warm them](https://archiveofourown.org/works/11401830), which I consider somewhat parallel to this story: same characters, but not quite the same world.
> 
> As always, my most eternal expressions of gratitude go to my friend and beta, [Peninsulam](http://archiveofourown.org/users/peninsulam/pseuds/peninsulam) for their constant support, rapt attention to my ramblings, and ongoing genderstuff talk. 
> 
> A note on tags: I've tagged this both "Genderqueer Bucky Barnes" and "Female Bucky Barnes" because Bucky's identity falls somewhere near what we might now consider genderqueer, but is also rooted in a particular context of butch identity, and I want to capture the ways borders between these particular identities aren't clearly delineated for her.
> 
> A note on content: as this fic takes place during wartime, you can expect some WW2-contextual violence and trauma and minor character deaths. If you have specific concerns regarding content, please do get in touch with me -- I'm lbmisscharlie at tumblr and gmail as well.

_January 1943, Pittsburgh_

Steve’s hands are sweaty and keep slipping against the metal grip of her gun. Her blood thrums close to the surface of her skin, loud and demanding in her ears and heavy in the hollow of her throat. Next to her, Bennett counts down _three two one_ with his fingers. Steve takes a breath and plunges forward.

The lights glare, much brighter than in rehearsal, and Steve can’t find the tape indicating her mark. She hesitates, standing awkwardly in front of the row of dancers, as Hodge finishes his line.

“—in the barrel of your best guy’s gun.” It’s her cue and she’s not in the right place and under the harshness of the lights she can barely see the words typed out on the little card taped to her oversized riveting gun prop. A pause. The band plays the same beat over again. Steve shuffles forward.

And then, yes, there it is, she finds her mark, steps up and cements her feet over it, lifts the riveting gun up. “And don’t forget, there’s plenty of work to be done at home,” she says, using the voice Bennett taught her, cheery and loud, from the depths of her chest. Her chest that no longer aches, that rises and falls with deep, unencumbered breaths.

She remembers to breathe, continues her speech. “With our boys off fighting, it’s our responsibility to make sure the factories keep their doors open. Every rivet keeps them safe.” She knocks the end of her riveting gun up against the hull of the mock-up tank in the middle of the stage and mimes setting it off. The sound effect from backstage goes off half a second too late. Spreading a big, wide grin, Steve holds the gun up, empty hand on her hip and legs spread shoulder-width. Behind her, the gals do high-kicks.

“That’s right, Miss Victory,” Hodge says, in his canned stage voice. He continues his spiel — two more lines until the gals conclude with a repeat of the chorus of _Star Spangled Man_ and swarm around Steve, forming a long line of slim, high-kicking legs and short, shimmering skirts behind Hodge. Steve originally had more to do, but was so hopeless in rehearsal that they cut it down to setting one rivet and saying two lines, then standing there like a goon with a painful grin on her face. And she almost screwed that up today. 

“—wiiiith a plan,” the girls sing. The lights pull up in front of them, so that Hodge is just a dark mass at the front of the stage, glitzy uniform tight across shoulders twice as wide as they had any right to be. Captain America, they’ve named him.

The music comes down, three beats and finished, and Steve’s a second too late to the coordinated salute, awkwardly trying to catch up once she realizes. No one will notice, though, not with a dozen dancers and Hodge the size of a grizzly bear in front of them. The curtain drops.

The dancers file off stage as a group, Hodge stomping just behind them. Steve leaves some space between him and her own steps, watching as he tosses the shield at Bennett and pulls the cowl off, dropping it to the floor. For all that he’s mastered the steps and the swaggering, confident ease needed to deliver his lines, Hodge hates this, maybe even more than Steve herself does. 

Back at the dressing room, Steve tucks her riveting gun into the back of her locker and unpins the kerchief wrapped around her head. It’s a ridiculous thing, shimmering silver to match the sequins that line her snug boiler suit, and under it her hair is built up into the sorts of sculptural curls she used to envy on Rebecca. Dolores, one of the dancers, does them for her; though her hair has a new sheen to it, no longer dry and limp at the ends but full and thick, she still has no idea how to handle it. She touches the rolls tentatively, looking in the mirror. Staring back at her is a jawline too broad, a mouth too red. 

Swiping some cold cream onto a facecloth, Steve rubs at the heavy layers of shadow and liner on her eyes, wipes away the caked powder and rouge that keep her from looking too pale under the lights. She cleans the lipstick away last and looks at her face, clean and pink with just a lingering stain of crimson across her lips, for a long moment. It’s still strange, but it’s closer to what she remembers of herself, or what she remembers thinking she might be. Nothing too much, just a bit of pressed powder and her mouth flushed pink. 

Dolores sits down next to her, still in her costume, big bouncy curls damp around her temples from the dancing and the lights.

“You did alright,” she says. Steve looks at her, doleful. “Well, you didn’t fall off the stage or anything,” 

“Not a high standard,” Steve says. She never fell _off_ in rehearsal, just down once or twice. 

Dolores tips one shoulder up, something like a shrug. “You’ll get there,” she says, endlessly optimistic. “Will you come and have a drink with us?” First night on the road, everyone’s a little keyed up, gals around them laughing and chatting and bumping against one another with giggles as they change. The room is small, and hot, and her costume is far too tight. Instead of answering, Steve fumbles at the snaps doing up the front of the boiler suit, pulls them apart. Her camisole, underneath, is wet through with sweat. 

“Not tonight,” Steve says, as soon as she feels like she can breath again. Dolores watches her for a moment, then nudges her foot.

“Next time,” she says, serious enough that Steve thinks she’ll be held to it.

“Yeah,” she says, and keeps from rubbing her chest, at an ache that isn’t there.

++

Steve doesn’t wait for the rest of the girls to finish before leaving. She can get back to their boarding house on her own, and without a roommate she doesn’t have to worry about leaving the door unlocked or the light on. The dancers crowd in two to a room; Steve’s not sure if it’s simply the odd numbers or deference to her peculiar position in the troop that earns her a space of her own. 

On the way out of the theater, she bumps into Hodge as he throws his door open and barrels out. She notices quickly enough to deflect, just hitting his arm with her shoulder, but he still shouts at her. “Fuck, Rogers. Can you do anything but be a waste of space?” 

She thinks, very briefly, about punching him in the kidney. Instead, she rolls her eyes and says, “Goodnight to you, too, Hodge,” and steps around him. 

“Wait —” His voice is calmer, but Steve knows enough to recognize the seething undercurrent of anger that now habitually haunts their limited conversations. He’d never really liked her, but since the procedure there’s been a new bite to his words. 

He might have good reason. When Steve had stumbled out of the chamber, panting and covered in a chilling sweat, the first thing she remembers hearing was, “Did it work?” from Howard Stark’s mouth. She’d lurched forward another step, a haze of steam clearing around her, and Peggy had caught her hands while she heaved breath and felt her blood pound through every tiny capillary. 

“I believe so,” Erskine had answered, but she remembers turning to him, seeing his peering, confused expression. She didn’t really piece it together until later, until she had a chance to feel more than just the aching throbbing pain of her cells remaking themselves, until her body settled. The thing was, she didn’t really grow that much. Up half a dozen inches, sure, a bit broader in the shoulders and hips, and a layer of muscle over all her bones where she’d once been skinny as a stick. It was different enough to still shock her when she woke up filling more space in her bed, but not so much that it was immediately recognizable in the haze and excitement of the procedure. 

And then Hodge had gone in, and shoved his way out before they turned the Vita rays all the way off, and he was the size of a bear, bulky and broad and thick-necked. And that damned Hydra spy had seen Hodge, a mammoth of a man, and had tried to steal the serum. 

She doesn’t even remember the shot that killed Erskine. Didn’t know that he was dead until she came back after watching the Hydra agent spit bloody, cyanide foam and twitch until he died and finally fell still. 

“Yeah?” she says, looking somewhere near Hodge’s left shoulder. Her fists are loose at her sides. He’s quiet, and she risks a look at his face. Narrowed-eyed annoyance. 

“Nothing. Just hit your mark next time.” She thinks about saluting, about giving him a sarcastic _sir yes sir_ just to remind him that his Captain title doesn’t hold when they’re off the stage. He’s no more than she is, played with and discarded by the US Army. Instead she brushes past him, her shoulder knocking against his arm hard enough to remind him that she’s not just like she was when they were at Camp Lehigh. To remind them both.

The boarding house is only two blocks from the theater; you’d think the landlady would be used to theatrical sorts coming through town, but she still frowns at Steve and every one of the dancers each time they go in or out, like she’s sure one or all will cause her untold trouble. Letting herself in with the latchkey, Steve hopes Mrs. Collins has already gone to bed, but Steve has never had the greatest of luck, and she’s in the sitting room with lethal-looking knitting needles and a deadlier expression. Steve tries her best stage grin as she passes, wishes her a cheerful goodnight, and gets a hum in return.

The thing was, she thinks, closing the door behind her, that they’d all got it wrong at first: Erskine, Howard, Hodge, the Hydra agent. Steve’s transformation had worked perfectly; she can run faster than a car, and when she catches it up she can pull the side door clean off its hinges, and when she finds a man she knows is her enemy, she can hold him up above her with one hand to his throat like he’s nothing but a spider, ready to be squashed. She might still be clumsy on her feet when it comes to dancing on a stage, but in the rush of a chase and the familiar heated thrust of a fight, all the instincts she spent weeks training into her body by sparring with Agent Carter and mucking through mud and climbing up posts are still there, only bigger. 

It’s Hodge who didn’t work.

Taller than any man, broad as a truck, Hodge’s fists are still formidable, but not any more so than in his last week of training. When Steve took off running, through the antique store and down the street and to the docks, Hodge started right behind her. He’s always been a solid runner, not fast, but capable, and that hasn’t changed. That’s the problem.

Steve unbuttons her dress and hangs it up. Newly bought, with her first and last Army paycheck; she wants to keep it looking nice. Her camisole still sticks, tackily, to the small of her back. She runs a bit of water in the sink and peels it off, then her stockings, and dunks them in, lathering up a slither of soap until the water is just cloudy and leaving the mess there to soak. It’s a pain, doing things this way, piecemeal each night before they move on to the next town. 

Sitting down on the bed, Steve rolls her shoulders. They feel fine: no pains, no aches. She thinks about the advertisements for cures for all ills in the back of the magazines her Ma sometimes brought home — Beecham’s and Nervine and Phensic. _Why Suffer Needlessly? Try Stark’s Patented Vita Ray Treatment Today!_

Naked, she lies down on top of the bed. The chill wind outside whistles around the corners of her window. She doesn’t feel it. The cold, at least; the air she senses in the shifting of the hairs on her arms, each minute change registering across the surface of her skin. She leaves her arms loose beside her, hands flat on her thighs, and lets her eyes fall closed. Outside the wind blows north-northeast, skittering across the surface of her window, and inside it stirs with air made stale by years of shifting inhabitants. Perfume, old paint, the faint sickly smell of sour vomit, the salty tang of humid sweat all linger in the carpet, the wallpaper, their palimpsest presence suffocating the moment Steve stepped into the room. Now, she breathes in, out, nose first then mouth, taking in the smell and taste of the air, letting each individual essence cleave from the whole, make itself known and cataloged. It’s the only way she’s taught herself to manage the onslaught. 

The sounds bombard, however, assailing against the weak, buzzing barricade she manages to set in her eardrums when she tightens her throat. Sounds are persistent. The noise of traffic, for instance, is not merely the rumble of engines or the occasional blare of a car horn, it is also the friction of tire to asphalt, the hum of turning belts, the cough of exhaust. In the boarding house, she hears the murmur of her neighbors on all sides, their little movements, their running pipes. It will drive her mad, she thinks; it might merely be a matter of time.

In those first few days after the chamber, after Erskine’s death, Stark and his team had besieged her with a non-stop storm of questions and tests, on her blood, her cells, her measurements, her reflexes, her senses. Questions, only: she was to be the answer, Steve herself and Hodge, too, and it was far too clear that the answers were inadequate. Stark had no way to tell Steve what she needed most to know, to help her figure out how to deal with the way the world — which has always been so much to Steve, so many potential allergens and sources of pain — the way it clamors against every surface of her body, demanding. How to feel out the new borders of that beleaguered body, to know its capabilities and to find its limits. 

Underneath her hands, her thighs are tight, full. When she flexes her foot, muscles rise up below her palm. She hasn’t woken with a charley horse in weeks, hasn’t twisted an ankle even with all the stumbling around she does on stage during rehearsals. Her knees don’t ache with the cold. She bends her knees, puts her feet flat on the coverlet, watches her the muscles of her thighs tighten then spread. Below the skin, her blood thrums gently; she feels it, just as she does the air whispering over her skin, and it’s different than before, too. Before, she knew her blood when it rose up hot and heavy to stain her skin, to pulse in her ears, to — to throb, aching, between her legs. 

She looks down. Everything about her is fuller now: the rise of her hipbone not so sharp, a pair of gentle cupping curves with softness between, one place where her muscles are tender, supple. The smattering of hair between her thighs is denser now — just as it is on her head — even those springy curls made unfamiliar to her hand. She hasn’t touched herself since the procedure, half afraid that that, too, will be all too much, that the raw, pounding, aching need that had sent her spare, sometimes, had left her with her legs trembling and sore, her mouth pressed hard to her pillow to avoid waking Bucky, that had sent a heated sort of torment from her gut to the very tips of her fingers, will, in this strange body, break her apart. 

Or, perhaps, and perhaps worse, that the ache will break against her body to diffuse and flounder, that her body is full up of sensation and it is no longer her choice to give it more.

She lets her knees drop open, a little. The cool air brushes over her, where she’s hot but not yet slick. Around her, the boarding house is quiet, the earliest to rise already tucked away and the night owls still out enjoying what glitz the town offers. The closest sounds are her own breaths, a steady in-out with no rattling. Closing her eyes, Steve draws one hand up over her stomach and touches her breast; it fills her hand, the nipple hard against her palm. She inhales, exhales, thinks about the sensation of her nipple against her hand: tingling, gentle. When she brushes the pad of her thumb against its tip, a shock of heat fills her cunt. Not so unfamiliar. 

Letting her other hand slip lower, she rubs at the thatch of hair, cupping her cunt and letting the rough vibrations of her stroking hand send a tremble under her skin. The touch of her own hands isn’t enough, never quite has been, so she sets her thoughts to another body pressed against her, anonymous but warm, lean, a soft mouth on hers. She’s never been quite certain what a gal is supposed to think of when she does this — if she does this. A fella from the pictures? A guy she’s sweet on? There’s no one who bides in her mind.

So she thinks — she thinks of Bucky, hair slicked back and shiny, uniform sharp and creased across her shoulders. Handsome. She doesn’t know, can only think what it looks like: Bucky, her brow in shadows by the brim of her cap, her stride made heavy by the weight of her boots. Mud streaked all across her, and blood, and her cheekbones hollow like they never have been, not with Mrs. Barnes’s cooking and drinks and dancing on the weekends, and pain in her eyes. Steve screws her eyes shut tight, sends fireworks over the inside of her lids, shoves her thoughts away, into the darkness. Instead: Bucky, hair falling into her eyes, cheekbones warmed by the sun coming in their living room window, mouth wet and open, happy. Bucky, her bare back to Steve and her neck exposed, her breathing raw and ragged and her hands down between the thighs of a girl Steve can no longer picture.

It’s the only image she has of the act — of any act. She’s never been to the blue pictures, never even really seen much more than a pinup in print. She knows how it should work, of course, but any time she sets her mind to thinking of a fella between her legs, sliding into her, his mouth on hers, or on her neck, her breasts, her mind skitter-stops over to Bucky’s bowed head, to the steady, hungry movements of her hand. Once, she told herself that it wasn’t anything more than that: one long-held memory her only real vision of what it can look like when two folks come together, but she’s stopped telling herself that. 

Not since one night, a few months ago, when her mind offered her up a picture of herself, narrow and small, on the bed between Bucky’s steady shoulders, wearing the butter-yellow slip Bucky got her for her birthday. It doesn’t fit her anymore, would strain and split across her broader back, and she only wore it a couple of times, when Bucky wasn’t home. It’s in her suitcase, tucked into the side pocket that’s meant for such things, the delicate things that could get lost or snagged in the main compartment, and it only takes her a quick moment to retrieve it. 

Lying back down, she lets the slip drape over her chest, almost like she’s wearing it, the delicate lace edge framing the top of her sternum, straps dangling uselessly against her shoulders. Against her skin, the silk is cool, soft — tiny, insignificant words that no longer even skim the surface of the sensations she can feel. It’s like liquid over her body, encompassing, soaking in: when she presses her hand against her breast, through the silk, the feeling is as heavy as cream, rich and viscid and sleek. She slides her thumb upward, rolling it against the peak of her nipple, and shudders at the slick, shocking heat that roils through her body. Opening her eyes, she looks up at the ceiling — bleak, grey — and breathes in through her nose, and rolls her thumb again.

It is as though, with the metamorphosis of her cells, the Vita radiation also grew her new nerves. Each touch of her thumb sends shockwaves; when she clenches her muscles, she can feel the infinitesimal shifts that bring her awareness, tight, to her center. She thinks about what the silk would feel like between her legs, soft against where she’s hot and slick. She’d do it, if she wasn’t worried about mussing it, leaving stains on the silk. It’s too nice, too good to spoil like that, to leave dredged with the evidence of what she’s doing. In her belly, something gathers hot and dark, like guilt; she presses one hand against it, then moves it lower, nudging the hem of the slip out of the way.

It brushes against her wrist as she cups her hand around her cunt. Like she’s reaching into a girl’s panties, or like she’s moving the slip out of the way for someone else’s hand. She worries, suddenly, that Bucky will be disappointed that it doesn’t fit her anymore; she’s got to have spent a penny on it, and they’ve always worn everything they owned right up until it wore out. And now, Bucky won’t ever see her in it, won’t ever touch the bare back of her shoulders where the slim straps rest, won’t ever feel the hem of it flutter against her wrist as she puts her hand on Steve’s thigh — 

Steve shakes her head, stares up at the darkening ceiling. The thing is, Steve’s no fool. She knows what it’s like to feel Bucky’s eyes on her, all the time, but she also knows that the warmth they hold is concern, not desire. Her raking gaze skating across Steve’s narrow shoulders and heaving chest, taking in her too-pale skin and her hands clenched tight against the cold, her legs that didn’t grow quite straight, and seeing every winter ‘flu, every asthma attack, every time Steve hauled herself back from the toilet clammy and grey. She told Steve she was beautiful, sure; they’re best friends, and beauty sometimes means what you see and sometimes just means what you know. 

But that’s all fixed now. Even if it all still feels remote, independent of her mind, her body is all fixed up now. So maybe Bucky could — maybe she might — maybe Bucky could _want_ her like this, not just want to protect her.

Steve curls her hand in on herself, parting the lips of her cunt to stroke where she’s wet, and feels that niggling guilt again, at thinking of Bucky while she touches herself that way. She shouldn’t; she does. Curls her fingertips and slides them upwards, through her slick and up to her clit. It’s hard, swollen, hot under her fingers, and at her first touch she jolts, knowing with a feverish and sudden certainty that no matter how unfixed she feels in this body, how she still seems to rattle around in it like it’s a too-big coat, it still is full up of sensation, ready to brim over. She’s worked up already, volatile, on the edge, and when she tips over she feels the clenching in her cunt tighten and then spread, out to the tips of her limbs. 

Lying back, Steve pants, letting her hand fall against her thigh, leaving a streak of wet. There’s the softest sheen of sweat at her temples, but her heart rate is already slowing, her breath calming. The silk draped across her chest flutters with her exhale when she looks down, and she feels suddenly embarrassed by the gleam of the fabric against her skin, by the sweet, delicate lace that seems like something a different sort of girl entirely would wear. Sitting up, she wipes her hand on her thigh and folds the slip, tucking it back into her suitcase. For one long moment, she sits at the edge of the bed, gripping her knees, before she turns into bed and pulls the coverlet up.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Title comes from the third poem of H.D.'s _Trilogy_ , "The Flowering of the Rod":
> 
> I go where I love and where I am loved,  
> into the snow;
> 
> I go to the things I love  
> with no thought of duty or pity;
> 
> I go where I belong, inexorably,  
> as the rain that has lain long
> 
> in the furrow; I have given  
> or would have given
> 
> life to the grain;  
> but if it will not grow or ripen
> 
> with the rain of beauty,  
> the rain will return to the cloud;
> 
> the harvester sharpens his steel on the stone;  
> but this is not our field,
> 
> we have not sown this;  
> pitiless, pitiless, let us leave
> 
> The-place-of-a-skull  
> to those who have fashioned it.


	2. Chapter 2

_January 1943, near Béja, Tunisia_

Bucky’s hands are cold. She thinks about the woolen mittens shoved in her pack, misshapen, pathetic things made by some schoolgirl in Tulsa or Omaha or somewhere. The USO ships them over by the box load, socks and mittens and hats in god awful colors; Bucky’s are brown with garish orange cuffs, an affront to all common aesthetic dignity, but they are warm. They remind Bucky a little of a pair Steve used to have, knit by Susanna, maybe, she doesn’t remember. Also sin-ugly and too big for Steve’s hands, but she’d worn them all through winter. Bucky remembers draping them over the clothes rack in front of the stove to dry, and tucking them into Steve’s coat pockets in the morning so she wouldn’t forget them. 

“My hands are fucking cold,” she mutters to Lee. She’d thought North Africa would be a desert, dry and hot. Since jumping off a landing boat into the sea at Oran, she’s learned better. The 107th has marched some eight hundred miles across Algeria, across desert and mountains and floodplains. Mostly, she’s learned that the harsh winter wind kicks up snow just as much as sand, and that the roads drink up the rain until they’re sucking mires of mud under the feet of 30,000 soldiers and a couple hundred tanks. 

Lee yawns. “I ain’t gonna hold them,” he says. She narrows her eyes. He doesn’t even fucking talk like that; she thinks his own accent is mostly dry, a sort of concision she associates with the pictures, but he picks up the inflections of everyone around him. She’s not sure if he can control it, really, but she does know he plays it up because he knows it annoys her. 

She shifts, shoves one hand between her thighs, keeping the other on her rifle. “Goddamn I wish they’d hurry up. We’ve been here for hours.”

“I thought snipers were supposed to be patient,” he says, craning his head to look up at the sky through the crack at the bottom of the boarded-up window. The sun has shifted, nearly lowered behind the peaks of the roof across the muddy yard. 

“Didn’t say I was any good at this,” she says. “Why do you think they assigned me to you?” Truth is, neither of them have any fucking idea if they’re any good at this. A week into unit training somewhere in the English midlands, Colonel Mitchell noticed that Bucky’s targets always came back with a neat hole blowing out the center, and had shifted her over into marksman training. Lee, she knows, is overeducated for the Army, can do figures in his head faster than a calculating machine. They’d trained together in England, walked with B Company in a monotonous, griping group, but this is their first time out in the field as specialists. 

In the end, the invasion had been anti-climactic. The Vichy-controlled batteries they were supposed to take over in Oran had already been claimed by the French Resistance, and French commanders on both sides were happy enough to cooperate once the Brits and Americans had landed. So after a day’s confused, lackluster battle, the only course forward had been a long, punishing march east, to overtake the Tunisian coastal defenses from the Germans. Defenses hundreds of miles from where the Army had landed, defenses continually resupplied by boats from Italy. She’s been in the war for two months, her feet ache, her shoulders are hard with muscle, and her Springfield has barely been broken in. 

Even now, stuck-in at a camp east of Béja on their way up toward Bizerte and the coast, near enough to the German lines that they can hear the rumbling thunder of their tanks, they’re not really seeing action. Every rumor coming down from on high says that the final push is near, but in the meantime the majority of the 107th sits and waits, days broken only by the occasional sortie to take a minor battery or farmstead. 

So the giddy excitement filling the air as she and Lee set up in the near-abandoned barn was not hers alone. A chance for a real engagement — not to mention maybe their first glimpse at a German soldier — had Bucky’s fingers itching. It’s worn off a bit, in the wait, in the still and silent air. In enemy territory, in a barn on an old farm taken over by Nazi command — likely with the sincere compliments of the Vichy owners. Across from the barn, a neat little farmhouse sits, its whitewashed plaster walls and tidy blue shutters anomalous in the ochers and golds of Tunisia. 

“What are we even doing here?” Bucky mutters, and adjusts her grip. 

All she has to think about while they wait is one glimpse at a shitty photograph of a tall, gray-haired man in a Nazi uniform. Grandfatherly, if your grandfather were the type to sit you down and tell you tales of the great ascendancy of the white race. “Shoot him if he leaves before we get there,” Corcoran had said, because he made Sergeant and passes down the orders for their unit, because the world is actually laughing at her. He didn’t say that _before we get there_ would be three fucking hours; Bucky’s feet have gone numb. She rubs them together.

“It’s not even that cold.”

“You’re allowed to move,” Bucky bites back; marksman training did sink in, though it’s possible she’s not happy about it. 

“Aw, baby, you want a break?” 

“Yeah, and a coffee, too, dollface.” Bucky looks sidelong at Lee, who lifts one eyebrow and starts to say, earnestly, “If you need —” before a glint of light catches Bucky’s eye from across the way.

Three flashes in a row, from the edge of the building — Corcoran’s signal. “Okay,” Lee breathes, settling his posture minutely to look into his scope. Bucky’s already got hers trained on the front door. There’s one back door, plus ground floor windows all the way around, and when the rest of the unit goes in, it’s Bucky’s job to make sure that the only people who step out of the front door and stay alive wear a U.S. Army uniform. 

She takes a breath. “Winds southwest,” Lee murmurs. “Distance forty-three yards.”

“Easy,” Bucky mutters back, and then there are shouts and gunshots across the way. The crack of glass breaking is no louder than a bell, a far-away tinkling. The front door is huge in the eye of her scope, filling up her whole field of vision: pale blue paint chipping; plate glass windows in the top like the people who built it had never feared. They’re blacked out now, dark to match the tarnish on the doorknob. The doorknob turns.

Grey uniform, panicked grimace. Bucky shoots, clips his right shoulder. The man staggers. “South half a degree,” Lee murmurs. Bucky shifts the bolt up-back, front-down to reload, finds his heart, makes the correction, shoots again. He falls. Blood splatters across the white-washed wall behind him, a long smear left in the wake of his fall.

After him, another, then another. She counts her cartridges; one more and Lee will pass her a new charger. The door wavers uncertainly in the breeze. Behind it the front hall is a dark cavern, the nearly-set sun leaving the farm an uncertain shade of twilight gray. Movement. Bucky exhales.

Green uniform. It’s Garfield, giving them the okay. Lee shifts, breathes out, says, “Goddamn, Barnes.” Bucky straightens up; her shoulders ache. “You didn’t even need me,” Lee says. Bucky breaks down her rifle stand, slides the pieces away into her case, careful of the scope. Lee isn’t moving. 

The second two men went down with a single bullet each, to the heart. Bucky’s hands are still cold, but steady. In the back of her mind, she thinks _three_. Glancing up at Lee, she pastes on a grin. “Don’t be sore, darlin’,” but the humor doesn’t break the pole-axed look on Lee’s face.

“I didn’t think —” he starts, then shakes his head, turns to pack up his scope. 

“They weren’t hard shots,” she says, after a beat. Lee looks at her again, shrugs one shoulder up. It says all he needs to.

Outside, they meet up with the rest of the unit. Three guys have the man from the photograph tied up; there are no other prisoners. The rest of their bounty is a set of wooden chests, filled up with maps and papers, that they put on the floor of the truck, where their boots knock up against the swastikas emblazoned on each side as they ride back to camp. They stay silent, because of course the Kommandant speaks English, and it’s a long ride back. Bucky keeps her hands curled in fists in her lap.

++

Corcoran doesn’t come find her until the next day, when she’s working the Springfield clean at the end of the day. The wooden stock is smooth under her hands — she’s not the first to hold it — and she knows that the bolt action is working just fine, but she gives it a little oil, rubs at the mechanism anyway. Corcoran stands above her, waves his hand and says, “As you were,” before she can even gather the stuff in her lap to stand. He’s very tall, bullishly broad-shouldered, and when she cranes her neck to look up at him, he’s looking above her head, off to the horizon somewhere.

“Those three kills were all yours,” he says. It’s not a question, so she doesn’t respond. “Lee tells me you didn’t even need his direction after the first shot.” A pause. He looks down at her; her hands itch, curl into fists. “That true?” he asks finally, sensing she’s waiting for a question.

She shrugs one shoulder up. She would have landed the second shot on her own, without Lee’s spotting. “They weren’t hard shots,” she says, like she did to Lee. They weren’t: clear field of vision, light enough, not even four dozen yards’ distance. 

Corcoran is still looking at her. “They were good shots,” he says. His gaze lingers; she shifts. Her neck twinges, looking up at him; her hands twitch. She doesn’t answer, and finally, after a long, narrowed-eyed stare, he says, “Good work,” as though it’s being drug out of him. “Impressed someone on high. Corporal.” He tosses her a new set of chevrons and leaves. 

Bucky grips the patches in her hand and thinks about how better to be invisible. While she does like the sound of Corporal Barnes, the idea of the brass paying attention to her sends an unsettled prickle to the back of her neck. It’s been easy enough, up until now: the invasion was over too quickly for anyone to make a hero of himself, even if Bucky’s still-seasick stomach would have tolerated heroics, and on the march they’re all one and the same, a vast hoard of mud-covered soldiers trudging away their days. She’s hardly the only one sick to death of walking in a straight line, whose ears buzz with the rumble of tanks and trucks that punctuate the marching infantry, who is happy to just eat shitty rations and collapse into a bedroll at the end of the day, three or four to a tent. She’s just a soldier; there’s no place for her to stand out. 

Their unit is ensconced in the foothills outside the city, a position from which they can sortie out and make targeted attacks on the piecemeal German and Italian posts across the countryside. The camp is dotted across with tents, bigger lean-tos serving as the mess and officer’s quarters. Bucky bunks down with Lee most nights, the shoulder-closeness they’ve developed in the field translating far more easily than Bucky expected into a sort of camaraderie. She doesn’t mind; he doesn’t ask a lot, and they give each other what little privacy they can afford, and his snoring isn’t even that bad. 

The Springfield cleaned and reassembled, she heads back to the cluster of tents housing B Company, dropping off her gear. The rifle’s clunky to carry around what is, by all accounts, a peaceful camp, but she does keep her sidearm strapped to her waist. Supper bell clangs just as she finds Lee leaning against a tree and stitching on his own new chevrons. She flashes hers at him, and they share a grin before making their way to the mess and back together. It’s hot beans and potatoes spooned onto their tin plates, and by the rising chatter around them, Bucky figures she’s not the only one who’s in good spirits. 

She sits down next to Lee, crooked stumps serving as stools. Soon enough, Garfield and Oakley join them, with cups of something that looks like coffee, even if it doesn’t smell too much like it. 

In these long lulls, the temptation to talk about home is overwhelming. What the hell else are they going to talk about? The weather, the shitty food, the relative dryness of their socks, the fellas who died the day before? So instead, they talk about what they miss, who they’ve got waiting for them. If someone has a letter, they’ll share, and they listen to each other’s news like it’s a radio play. Mail was held up while they marched, but it’s been trickling in over the past few days since they’ve been stalled, and Bucky’s been missing Steve’s crabbed handwriting, and her Ma’s news from home, but today there’s a brand-new letter from Steve tucked up against her chest, one page of writing and another torn from her sketchbook. Bucky’s saved it, tucked into an inside chest pocket, until they have a quiet moment. Setting her plate aside, she pulls it out, unfolds the pages. It’s old — dated to just after the invasion, nearly two months back.

“News from home?” Garfield asks.

“Yeah,” she says. “That friend of mine, Steve.” Garfield nods, leaves her to it, and asks Lee something about his kid sister. 

_Dear Bucky,_

_I did get that job – it’s with the USO. It’s not exactly what I expected, but the folks are nice and I’m getting to travel._ It’s not what Bucky expected to read, either, though she spares a moment’s thought to the idea of Steve up on stage in a shiny dress, crooning into a microphone. Morale would plummet, she’d say to Steve, having to listen to your cat-screech voice. 

She returns to the letter. _And no_ , Steve writes, _I’m not singing._ She doesn’t actually explain what it is she is doing, but the letter is peppered with the names of co-workers and feels far more cheerful than the last, so Bucky just makes a note to prod her for more information in her next letter. Steve’s postscript is no less enigmatic: _I’m sending you a sketch of what I see most days, with a hopeful addition._

“Steve’s got a job with the USO,” she says.

“He got the voice for it?” Lee wisecracks.

“Like a banshee’s,” Bucky deadpans. She flips to the second page and unfolds it; the paper feels familiar in her hands, years of flipping through the pages of Steve’s sketchbook. The drawing is quick and loose, just a pencil sketch, but it shocks a happy guffaw out of Bucky before she even realizes. 

“Comes with benefits, though,” she says, and passes the drawing to Lee.

In one long horizontal line, a row of gals do high-kicks, their perfectly lined-up legs like the keys to a piano, their heads thrown back, just fuzzy suggestions of faces and hair. It’s all about their legs, curvy, with cute little heeled shoes and very short skirts, and in the corner there’s a little sketch that has to be Bucky, in her duck-cloth work jacket and her hair slicked back. A little floating speech bubble has her saying _Worth it for the girls alone._

She remembers every inch of that night, but she’s surprised to find that Steve remembers, too. Stark’s girls had been real pretty, but that wasn’t exactly what she had been meaning to say when she turned to Steve. Or, at least, she doesn’t think so.

When they’re more alert, or someone’s passed around a bottle, the chatter invariably turns cruder. There’s nothing a group of hot-blooded men miss more, out here in the dim forests of Italy, than the pussy of bygone days. It’s practically a sport, or an art, the crafting of a truly good filthy boast, and if it’s a startling shock to Bucky at first, the minute attention these men will spend describing the exact heft of a gal’s breasts, the tightness of her little cunt, after a while she lapses into amusing herself by adjudicating which ones are true or false. Some of these fellas have never so much as touched a nipple other than their own or their Momma’s, that much is certain. 

They’re usually more respectful of that hallowed host, the gals back home. Some guys will pass around a picture of a mild-looking girl, in the black drape and pearls of a high school portrait, maybe, perfectly pinned curls and dark lips. Their stories are ones of future houses, little babies, hot dinners on the stove.

Bucky has one picture of Steve, a candid taken by Susanna on her little Brownie camera, where Steve is half-turned to look just beyond the camera with a huge grin on her face, hair loose with strands blowing across her forehead. She’s looking at Bucky, who was standing a little bit away from Susanna; she can’t remember what she said at that moment, but remembers the way Steve turned to look at her, bright smile, and then cracked up laughing. She keeps the photo tucked away in her copy of _Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea,_ because you’re never all alone in the army, and she’s not willing to engage in the fiction that will be assumed. That Steve is her girl back home, waiting for her. It’s not at all what Steve deserves.

She does tell stories about Steve, mostly childhood scrapes, and carefully avoids pronouns. Lets everyone think something real close to the truth: two fellas, best friends since they were kids, with a war and an ocean separating them like nothing else ever has.

Lee gives a whistle, passes the drawing over to Garfield. 

“You said your friend was sickly?” Garfield says. Bucky nods. “Well, damn, that’s a sight that would perk a body right up. Or —” he makes a motion next to his crotch, as if his comment needed any elaboration. 

“Not a bad way to serve,” Oakley adds, giving a leering look to the drawing. “With gals who spread their legs for a living.” He grins at Bucky, who wants to roll her eyes.

“I’m sure Steve’s enjoying it,” she says dryly. Packed in tight with a bunch of twittering girls, Steve’s probably wishing she stayed at the bakery. 

Dropping his empty tin to the ground, Lee wipes his mouth, burps. “You ever do it with a dancer?” he says, casually, more to the group than to any one in particular. Bucky looks at the ground, thinks about Angela, who danced at the Arcadia and liked Bucky’s mouth on her cunt. 

“Not the type you’re thinking of,” Garfield says, eyebrow lifted, “but Linda did ballet when she was a kid.” As a group, they groan; Lee throws his fork at Garfield. They’ve heard plenty about his gal back home, Linda, who can apparently sing like an angel and fuck like a French prostitute. 

“Knew a girl who sang revue once,” Oakley says. “She sort of just shuffled around the stage, though.”

“Bucky?” Lee asks. He’s prodding, a little; Bucky has once or twice slipped out of these conversations with a platitude about not kissing and telling, which is generally excused when there’s a dozen guys all happy to step in and boast, with hand gestures, about their conquests. The last time she stayed silent, though, she’d felt his eyes on her.

It’d be a fair bit of irony if, instead of being found out as a woman, she got kicked out of the army for being a fairy. 

“Yeah,” she says, wiping her mouth. When she takes her hand away, she lets the corners curl up in a wicked grin. “Her name was Angela, and when she danced she wore a corset covered in shimmer. Damn flexible, even in the corset, but I made her take it off after the first time.” She knows how the stories need to go, now, the formula for the retelling, and she lets herself think about Angela in the dressing room at the Arcadia, one leg bent up and draped over Bucky’s elbow, their bodies pressed tight together, Bucky’s fingers inside her. “Cause I had her up against the table in her dressing room, holding one of her legs up, fucking her hard, and when we were done, my chest glittered like the night fucking sky on the Fourth of July.” The analogy leaves a bitter, guilty taste in her mouth, but she swallows it away on a grin.

Lee snorts, and relaxes, leaning back on his hands. “You see a lot of her?”

“Oh, every inch,” Bucky quips. “Nah, last I heard she found herself a fella with a little more to his name than a slaughterhouse job and better prospects than getting himself shot at.” He might have been married, she doesn’t say; it hadn’t been her business to worry about Angela. They’d had a good time of it, though, before Angela told her, regretfully, that she had to break it off, cause her new fella was a jealous sort. She’d said it with her juices still on Bucky’s mouth, but with such style Bucky couldn’t be mad. 

Despite the bawdy talk, Bucky hasn’t thought in much depth about any of the girls she’s been with in her past since they landed — or even earlier. The boring weariness of training and the constant march had a way of exhausting any interest, and the constant crush of her fellow soldiers any opportunity. She’s doing a decent job of maintaining certain necessary aspects of privacy, but she figures in the close press of the tent someone might notice that her jerking it is a little different than theirs. 

They’ve moved on to a lounge singer Lee knew in L.A., and Bucky has a hard time not rolling her eyes at Oakley’s over-exuberant questions. With one last glance at Steve’s sketch, eyes lingering on the pleased grin on her own caricatured face and Steve’s firm handwriting — _worth it_ — Bucky tucks the letter away in her jacket pocket, takes a drink of her ersatz coffee, and pastes on a smile to jump back into the conversation.


	3. Chapter 3

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In June, they make their way across the flats of North Dakota, by train rather than bus. Coming off of two weeks in the Twin Cities, one to take on and train a dozen new dancers and one of back-to-back shows, seven evenings in a row and matinees every day except Sunday, the restful sight of bare, open grasslands outside the window is a welcome rest. Their car’s subdued, folks taking the opportunity for a catnap, so Steve rests her head and watches fence line hurtle past. Short, scraggly trees bend, yielding to the wind that buffets against the side of the train car, too, but the few cows and bison they pass seem unperturbed, grazing contentedly. A few raise their heads at the rumble of the train, and it’s only Steve’s newly-developed sight that lets her see the big, placid eyes of the beef cattle and the rangy, flintier gaze of the domesticated bison as they pass.

_March 1943, Milwaukee_

Dolores rakes Steve’s hair back with a comb, frowning at her grimace in the mirror. “If you’d ever learned how to do it yourself,” she says, pointing the end of the comb at Steve. 

Steve shrugs. “I’ve tried,” she says, because Dolores is looking at her the way Rebecca often did, incredulous and dumbfounded all at once. “Never quite had the knack,” she says, glancing down at her hands. They’re bigger, now, longer fingers that can grip hard and tight, but she’s still not sure she’s dexterous enough to achieve the deft little flip-curl-twist that Dolores is doing right now, a gesture that ends with a hank of Steve’s hair twisted in a huge barrel roll over her left temple, secured with pins nearly stabbed into her scalp. They have some version of this conversation nearly every night, as Dolores seems to have decided it’s her duty to make sure Steve looks ready for the limelight, and while Steve more or less has the habit of the makeup, getting her hair up into those dramatic barrels still escapes her.

Dolores slides her fingers through the fall of hair on Steve’s other side, her fingertips slipping across the skin at Steve’s temple. Without intending to, Steve tilts her head, leans into her hand; Dolores smiles at her in the mirror, lacquered mouth shiny. “Never had a girlfriend to teach you?” Dolores says as she combs a hank of hair and starts to wind it. 

The pins poking against her scalp do feel familiar, the smell of hair lacquer as sharp as she remembers, but Dolores’s hands on her feel different than Rebecca’s ever did. “My, um, you know my friend Bucky?” She’s always awkward when she mentions Bucky, no matter how she tries to keep her words offhand and natural. It’s not that it’s difficult to keep to who Bucky is now — Specialist James Buchanan Barnes, 107th Infantry — it’s that so much of their life takes on a slant when Bucky is a _he_. Even the most liberal-minded of her new friends would likely find it a bit shocking, their living together without being married, and there are fictions Steve isn’t willing to take up. It wouldn’t be fair to Bucky, pretending like this ache Steve has gotten used to carrying around was real, was something to Bucky, too.

“Bucky’s sister, Rebecca, did my hair nearly every week. I could never make it look like she did.” She glances up at Dolores in the mirror; her mouth is pursed, hairpins held between her lips, and her eyes on her own hands, but she’s listening. “To be fair, my hair was never as nice as hers, anyway.”

“Your hair’s lovely,” Dolores says after removing the last hairpin from her mouth and shoving it firmly into the second roll. “Amber waves of grain,” she adds, with a wicked grin. Steve gives her a sarcastic salute and picks up her sequined scarf to tie up around her head, tucked behind Dolores’s handiwork. There she is, Miss Victory USA, all glitz, glamour, and shiny red lips. In the mirror, Steve widens her eyes until her brows creep up comically, and Dolores grins and pats the top of her head.

“We’ll make a showgirl of you yet,” she says. 

It is a real group project, Steve thinks as she stands in the wings behind the dancers. They do their first number behind Hodge’s strutting Captain America, and then Steve’s on to blather about home front work and factories. She has all her lines down now, with a strong delivery, and they’ve started adding in a little choreography. No high kicks, but a slick little two-step shuffle that Steve’s starting to feel capable of. A couple of the gals think she’s hopeless, she knows, and maybe a little bit strange, but more of them are happy to help. Likely because they get a kick out of seeing what she _can_ do, once she tries once or twice: without the lights and the audience to rile her, make her stumble both her feet and her words, Steve is figuring out that this new body is capable of a lot. 

Her reflexes are quicker, now, especially since she can see clearly and hear even better than most people, as she found out after one too many unintentional eavesdroppings. Her balance is nearly miraculous and she doesn’t get dizzy, not even if she does a dozen clumsy spins or cartwheels clear across the stage. Though the newly-developed strength, in both her arms and her legs, had made itself quite clearly known on that first day, bursting out of the Vita Ray chamber only to have to chase a Nazi spy down to the docks, she didn’t really like showing it off at first. Seemed easier to keep it quiet than to deal with the thunderous brooding Hodge would bring out. But then she’d caught Aggie by the waist when she’d tripped and nearly fallen off the stage, and had pulled her back up easy, like she was no more than a fluffy kitten, maybe, instead of a well-toned full-grown woman, and that was it. 

They’d just today figured out how to get four girls up onto Steve’s shoulders and arms and one more up on top of _their_ shoulders, Aggie and Dolores and Marge and Bess in a row, all topped off by Lizzie, arms flung out wide like the star atop a Christmas tree. They’d tried to convince Bennett to put it in the show, but he’d just glared at them and said something about wanting to inspire the audience, not scare them. She can’t pretend it doesn’t sting a little, to know that no matter how much delight Aggie and Bess get out of sitting on her back while she does push-ups, there are others involved in the show who find her freakish. 

But then, that’s nothing new, just now it’s maybe for different reasons. Or at least the way her body works and moves visibly hides some of the other reasons people have had for calling her strange in the past. 

In the wings, Bennett flashes her three fingers, two, one, okay. She hefts up her rivet gun and steps out into the light.

++

Of all the strange, miraculous things Erskine’s serum did, right now Steve’s thankful for the stabilization of her motion sickness. They spend a lot of time on the tour bus. 

Some gals sleep, drowsing off hangovers or boredom. Betty always sits right up in the front and reads, some days heavy Russian novels or Dickens tomes, others the same kinds of potboilers Bucky likes to pick up. There’s often some mending to be done on the costumes, and they’ll all pitch in in turns, though Helen has the steadiest hands and the neatest stitches, nearly invisible. Steve would like to sketch, but the bumpy road frustrates her too quickly, so she ends up staring out the window at the passing miles of America. 

“Hey, Steve —” Steve glances over to Joan, reaches out on instinct, catching a ball of crimson red yarn. Joan grins; she’s not the only one who loves doing that, testing Steve’s reflexes. She’s more than once caught hair rollers and lipsticks, handkerchiefs and, on one occasion, a tin of johnnies, a rather cheeky-looking sphinx on the lid. It had taken her a moment to parse out its purpose, which had sent the rest up in hoots of delight. “You knit?”

Steve fingers the yarn; it’s soft against her skin. “Once or twice,” she says, remembering Susanna teaching her. She wasn’t very good, but then, neither was Susanna, though she has improved. She’d sent Steve off with a new pair of mittens, tighter and warmer than the pair Steve had worn for two years, an early attempt. No less ugly, though. Steve’s own attempts, on the subway to art class, weren’t much prettier.

“It’s for the troops,” Joan says, with mock seriousness. “Don’t forget, there’s plenty of work to be done at home.” Her voice is a pitch-perfect mock of Steve’s stage delivery.

“You practice that, don’t you?” Joan smiles, and gives her a little salute. 

She passes over a pair of knitting needles. “I can remind you of the basics,” she says. “We’ll have you doing lace in no time. Got a hope chest?” she adds, winking. Just the words send her back to Bucky, sprawled on the ground and shoving open the wooden chest her parents had sent over, giddily happy. Steve had sorted all the linens and dishes before she left, giving most to the newly-married Mr. and Mrs. Washington who’d moved in downstairs, and packing a few things back into the chest to be stored at the Barnes house. Bucky’s things she’d packed away without sorting, not willing to consider what Bucky might want when she returns from the war, undoubtedly changed. But the chest was big enough to hold the few things of her own Steve wanted to keep, mostly books, sketches, pictures. At the last minute, she’d wrapped the ceramic figurines Bucky had won her in a tablecloth and tucked them in, too. She can picture it: up in the attic crawl space, likely already gathering dust, and it feels very far away.

++

In June, they make their way across the flats of North Dakota, by train rather than bus. Coming off of two weeks in the Twin Cities, one to take on and train a dozen new dancers and one of back-to-back shows, seven evenings in a row and matinees every day except Sunday, the restful sight of bare, open grasslands outside the window is a welcome rest. Their car’s subdued, folks taking the opportunity for a catnap, so Steve rests her head and watches fence line hurtle past. Short, scraggly trees bend, yielding to the wind that buffets against the side of the train car, too, but the few cows and bison they pass seem unperturbed, grazing contentedly. A few raise their heads at the rumble of the train, and it’s only Steve’s newly-developed sight that lets her see the big, placid eyes of the beef cattle and the rangy, flintier gaze of the domesticated bison as they pass. 

She sketches a little. The hazy landscape passing them by, the curl of Joan’s hands around a crochet hook, the little smirk Dolores gets when she thinks she’s successfully bluffing against Aggie and Bess in pinochle. Herself, in her spangly uniform, but as a monkey on a unicycle. A creature performing tricks.

Her monkey-self looks sad. Steve flexes her hand even though it’s not sore, lets her pencil drop against the page. Outside, rain has started up, and the inside of the window is cold, damp with condensation. Dolores drops down heavily into the seat next to her.

“Did you win?” Steve asks, idly.

“Took ‘em for all they had, Marge and I.” Steve had thought of pinochle as a polite game, one of paired-off collaboration, but her friends play viciously, bidding with a fervor not seen outside of the most rank bookmakers, Steve would guess, and crowing with triumph at every thwarted trick. “What’s this,” Dolores says, nudging at Steve’s sketchbook. Steve angles it toward her, feeling a bit silly at the sketch it’s open on. Why not one of her nice portrait studies, something that might show that she has some actual class?

Dolores hums, fingering the edge of the page. “That how you feel, Steve?” she says, carefully. Steve glances up at the edgy note in her voice.

“Well,” she says, “yeah, I suppose so. Not like I’m doing anything really, I mean —” _real, meaningful_ — “useful.”

Nudging the sketchbook away a little, Dolores says, “That’s real fucked up, Steve.” She says Steve’s name a lot, but more when she thinks there’s something Steve’s missing, she’s come to find. Like: _of course we want you to come out for a drink with us, Steve_ or _Steve you’re delivering your lines plenty loud, stop shouting._ But when Steve catches her eye, they’re narrowed, annoyed, not just the sort of fond exasperation Steve’s tentatively getting used to.

She doesn’t know what that means. It’s not as though she’s made any secret of the fact that she’d rather be fighting — hasn’t gone so far as to say she’d tried it, signing up, but has commented on how she thinks the WAC should be allowed in combat, and how she’d like to punch Hitler in the jaw for real, not the fake stage punches between Hodge and Peterson, the fella who maintains their stage backdrops and plays Hitler in the show. 

“Is that what you think of all of us,” Dolores says. “Performing monkeys, not doing anything useful?” Steve’s mouth fills with a sour taste at the betrayal in Dolores’s voice, angry and bitter.

“No! I mean — I don’t —” She looks down at her hands, clenched together; looks up. “You’re all so much better at this than me. I’m still —” she shakes her head, trying to encompass what it’s like to be up on stage and know no one is there to see you. “But I feel like — there’s gotta be something more important for me to be doing. Men are dying, you know?”

“Yeah,” Dolores says. “Yeah, I know. Steve, do you know why I joined the USO? Or any of us?” She gestures around the train car to the girls, still engrossed in their naps, books, card games. Across the aisle from them, Aggie and Bess look caught-out under Steve’s glance, eavesdropping. “Have you ever asked?”

“No,” Steve says, shame running hot in her stomach. “I’m so sorry.” Dolores tilts her chin up, most of the rancor gone from her assessing expression. Steve looks down at the sketch, sees the anger in the deep, gouging lines. “Will you tell me? Why you got in?”

“’Course I will,” Dolores says. Aggie and Bess shove over to sit across the little table from them. 

“Is she giving you a dressing-down?” Aggie says, with some amusement. “’Bout time.” 

Steve wrinkles her nose. “I’m _sorry_ ,” she says again, maybe some small bit exasperated. “I never saw myself doing anything like this, is all. I’ve never been good at —” _being that kind of girl_ , she thinks, looking up under her lashes at Bess’s red-stained mouth, at Aggie’s ink-dark hair, rolled up in two huge sweeps above her temples. “Being looked at,” she finishes, inadequately. She lays her palms flat on the table, angles her body toward Dolores. “Did you always want to dance?”

Dolores grins, like all is forgotten, but Steve knows now that if she wants to see that grin again, that smile that makes her feel a little warm in her cheeks, she needs to think harder about what she’s doing here. In the troupe, on the road, on the stage, in this body.

“Not always,” she says. “I picked it up five, six years ago. Nothing formal at first, just out at the dance halls sometimes.” Dolores is from Chicago, had taken them all out to the Trianon when they were stopped there a month ago; Steve remembers the way she’d looked around like seeing home again. “But it was _so_ —” she gestures to Aggie and Bess, who both nod, soft smiles. 

“So _alive_ ,” Bess says. “When the rest of the world was so scared, or dull.” 

Dolores sighs. “I started taking some classes. When we joined the war, I had to — I couldn’t give it up.”

“Some days dancing’s the only thing that makes you feel like this world’s worth saving,” Aggie says, looking down at her hands. Bess grabs one of them, squeezes hard. 

Dolores is nodding. “And if I couldn’t give it up, I had to figure there was some way I could use it to help folks. You know I’ve got two brothers in the Pacific right now.” Steve blinks, looks at her; Dolores doesn’t make eye contact.

“I didn’t. Do you hear from them?” Bucky’s the only one she knows in combat, enough to worry over. She can’t fathom having this worry doubled, spread over two souls. She hasn’t had a letter in weeks, tells herself it’s only that it takes them a long while to catch up to the always-moving troupe.

“Not much. Mom had one from them when we were home last week. I can’t help but hope that some of what we raise goes to them, that maybe our show makes the difference.”

Bess nods. “My brother turns eighteen in two months, and he’s already so keen to sign up. Some days it seems like they’re going to get all the men they need, and then some, but someone’s gotta pay for their food, and their tents, and their guns.” _A bullet in the barrel of your best guy’s gun_ ; she’s been thinking of Bucky every time she heard that line, of course she has, but it’s not the kind of help she aches to give her, so she never quite thought of it in just those ways. Material ways: the difference between life and death.

“Joe always wanted to be a soldier,” Bess continues, “and I always wanted to dance. I never really thought of this kind, not until I saw the Stark show when it came through Spokane.”

“You saw Howard Stark?” Dolores asks, with interest. Steve wants to tell her he’s not as impressive in person.

“Nah, it was just his inventions, and the dancers. But they were having such fun up there, you could see just to look at them. And their playbill had a list of cities a mile long!” She sighs, lost in the memory. Steve doesn’t really remember the Stark dancers, just Bucky’s face as she watched them. “I’d never been further than Walla Walla before this.” 

“Yeah,” Dolores says, with a grin. “If you join the WAC you get to see the world from the inside of a field office. Join the USO and you see it from inside an amphitheater. Or a dance hall, later on.” 

“Much more fun,” Aggie agrees. 

“I never really traveled, either,” Steve says, smiling at Bess. “Didn’t have the money.”

“Nah, us either,” she says. “Farming, you know? But this way, I got to get out, got to be my own person. They can be real small-minded at home,” she says, with a sidelong glance at Aggie. 

Aggie snorts, says drily, “Folks can be real small-minded everywhere you go.” Steve thinks of the booking they’d had in Mobile, where Aggie, Mabel, and Florence had been refused entry into the dressing room backstage until Bess, Dolores, Joan, and Steve had thrown up such a fuss that Bennett had had to threaten canceling the booking altogether unless the manager allowed them in. Even then, they were snuck in through the back entrance like thieves. Bess grimaces, squeezes her hand again, tenderly.

“I was born to it,” Aggie says, with no pretense. “My first steps were on the stage of the Folies-Bergière.”

“Really?” Steve says, incredulous. She might not know dancing, but she does know Manet. 

Aggie nods. “My mother danced —”

“With Josephine Baker,” Bess interrupts, proudly.

“ _Really?_ ” Steve says again, finding herself a little bit dumbfounded. 

“They danced together in Paris, when I was a girl, and then we moved to Harlem and Momma started at Smalls Paradise. That’s where I got my start, too.”

“If there was anything right in this world, you’d have your own show,” Bess says fiercely. It seems as though they’ve had this conversation before, for Aggie simply shrugs up one shoulder.

“I’m young yet, darling,” she says.

“Does your Ma still dance?” Steve asks, trying to imagine an older version of Aggie, flinty and imperial until you catch her askance and see the slow, wide spread of her irreverent grin. Or of Aggie as a tot, toddling on stage with Josephine Baker herself.

“Sometimes. Teaches, more. She’s, uh,” Aggie looks down at her folded hands. Bess still clutches the top one fiercely. “I don’t think dancing behind _Captain_ America is exactly what she had in mind for me, you know?”

“I’m not sure he’s what anybody’s mom ever has in mind for their daughter’s future,” Dolores says, dryly. Steve snorts, and Bess grins at her, amused. It’s maybe the most pointed comment Steve has heard from any of the girls about Hodge, and she suddenly wonders if they hold back on her account, thinking them part and parcel. 

“Well, you know,” Aggie says, not without a smile. “It’s not that Momma doesn’t care about America, or about this war, it’s just —” She shrugs; Steve leans forward. 

“Yeah?” Steve prompts when she trails off. 

Aggie looks right at Steve. “Boys from Harlem are dying just the same as boys from Brooklyn are,” she says. “How much of this USO money is going to them, do you think?”

“Not enough, I’m sure,” Steve says. 

“We are helping,” Bess says, after a drawn-out silence. “We have to be. I can’t think what this world is, if — if a little brightness is no good.” Steve breathes out, blinks; if there’s one thing the Vita rays didn’t change, it’s her damned tendency toward welling eyes. Not tears, she refuses, as she would have if Bucky were there to cock an eyebrow at her and pointedly pass over a handkerchief. She swallows twice, hard, to manage it, thinks about apologizing again. Leave it, she thinks, and listen better.

++

Bond sales are low in Bismark, but the crowd makes up for it in enthusiastic applause. The girls do two encores after the finale, where Joan, Dolores, Gabriela, Bess, Aggie, and Lizzie make a human pyramid before Lizzie does a graceful jump off the top into Steve’s arms. They introduced it in St. Paul to thunderous acclaim, and even though it makes Steve’s chest pound like she’s ninety-five pounds again and trying to run a marathon, she can’t deny the little satisfied feeling she gets each time Lizzie lands perfectly, arms thrown out and a huge, broad grin, not nervous at all. Like she knows Steve will catch her, every time.

After the curtain finally goes down, they catch their breath backstage, dabbing away sweat and touching up lipstick, before heading out to the lobby. This is Steve’s least favorite part, but Bennett and the USO board are insistent that it’s the personal touch that makes folks open their pocketbooks. 

The crowd is familiar: kids and young women flock to Hodge, in equal albeit differing admiration of his muscles; men of all ages mingle with the dancers, who respond with varying degrees of patience; and Steve gets the spares. She’s not self-pitying, aware enough of the fact that her boiler suit covers nearly everything except a narrow vee leading to the top of her breasts while the dancers’ skirts are scarcely more than a ruffle. After the stage, with all those bright lights reflecting off of spangles and glossy lips, the only thing most of these fellas are going off of is whether they prefer a redhead or a brunette. 

She does often get the attention of factory girls, the women who do the actual work she just imitates. In Milwaukee, one of them corrects her grip on the rivet gun, but gives her a big, broad grin, and says, “You’d fit right in now,” and asks Steve to sign her program. 

Tonight, she’s scribbling _Miss Victory USA_ on the corner of a poster, up above the shellacked version of her face, when a commotion starts up across the lobby. A raised male voice, an indignant screech — Steve doesn’t need to hear any more before she’s shoving the poster back into the woman’s hands and tearing off across the room.

There’s a man, of course, red-faced and spluttering, but Steve turns her attention to her friends first. Lizzie, Joan, and Florence cluster together, Lizzie shoved a bit behind the other two; at Steve’s glance, Florence nods. They’re fine, just mad, an angry flush coming up on Joan’s cheeks, Florence’s hands balled into fists. Lizzie’s bottom lip trembles, but she stands firmly. Steve, therefore, feels no compunction in turning to the man and drawing her shoulders up and out, broad as she can make them.

“No need to get involved, sweetheart,” he says, which is really so predictable. Fellas getting a little fresh, a little too close, seems to happen after nearly every show, but it’s only every couple that they have one who decides to be so persistent. Steve will be having words with Bennett again; the girls will watch out for each other, of course they will, but it’s really too much that they’re expected to. 

“Nothing to get involved in,” Steve says, mildly. “As I see it, you were just leaving.”

“Why —” the fella takes a step closer, and Steve sends up just a little bit of thanks. 

Lifting one hand, she places it palm flat on his chest, near his heart, and says, “I can show you to the door if you’d like.” He bats at her hand, then glares up in surprise when it doesn’t move. Steve gives him a tight smile, presses just a bit with her hand. He reels back; in his eyes she can see the familiar struggle of debating whether she’s enough of a girl to deserve the chivalry of a pulled punch. She’s almost thankful when his hand tightens into a fist.

It takes no effort at all to catch his punch and turn, twisting his arm up behind his back. He’s whimpering a little as she frog-marches him to the door. Once outside, she lets up the twisting, keeping one hand around his wrist. “Learn yourself some respect,” she says as she releases him. There’s little she can do for follow-up, not like in Brooklyn where a few landed punches at least reminded the bullies that Steve Rogers was a little bit crazy and a lot of trouble; most of their Mas would have whupped them for fighting a girl, never mind a tubercular asthmatic. But he looks cowed enough, rubbing his wrist as he backs away from her, nearly tripping over his own boots as he stumbles off the curb to cross the street. 

Inside, Bennett has finally noticed the hubbub, if only because it’s cast quite a pall on folks’ eagerness to buy bonds, and the audience is drifting away. Walking across the lobby, folks give her a wide berth, and Steve feels her face heat uncomfortably. _They’re not here to look at you_ , she reminds herself, admonishment or comfort, and makes her way to have words with Bennett.

++

The train shudders to a stop as they’re coming up the pass on the western side of Montana. Steve’s been watching the slow, steady climb attentively; she’s never seen mountains like this. It’s hard to tell, until they pass a clear break in the trees and there, across a glacier-carved gulf, is a range of blue-tinged peaks, their tops hazy with clouds. She sketches quickly as they trundle along, sketchbook in her lap and eyes jumping between page and window, but she can’t quite capture the dizzying sense of altitude, the clear brightness of the thin air, the rich, velvety evergreen of the dense trees. 

They’ve stopped on a carved-out plateau; once the engines slow and come to a halt nothing around them moves, the air still, bright, and clear. Inside the train, a low din of chatter has started as folks begin to wonder why they’re stopped. Across from her, Joan has startled awake, and yawns, wide and annoyed, wiping her eyes. 

“Are we there?” she says, blinking at the light coming in the window.

“Nah,” Steve says. “Stopped for some reason.” Fiddling with the window, she manages to wrench it open, letting in a gust of cool air. When she cranes her head out, it’s apparent enough what’s holding them up: ahead, in a sliced-out curve hugging close to a steep rock face, the rails are completely obscured by a fall of boulders. Sliding out of her seat, Steve walks up the aisle and through the connecting doors, then up through the next couple of cars.

In the engine, there’s an anxious frenzy, as she expected. One guy talks into a radio, and the conductor speaks with a guy who must be the engineer in low tones. “What’s the plan, fellas?” she asks as she pushes the door fully open.

“Miss, back to your seat, please,” the conductor says immediately, and how Steve wishes for some kind of official authority to back up the annoyance she feels. 

“I assume you’ve figured out we’ve got to shift the rock slide out before we can see if the tracks are still passable or salvageable. I can help with that.”

The conductor blinks, seemingly ready to chivvy her right back to her seat himself, when the radio crackles. “Storm moving in from the east,” the voice on the other end says. “The repair crew is on another slide down by Lolo.” A long pause; the air in the room sharpens. “You’re on your own until tomorrow at least,” the voice says, finally, “and that storm will be a nasty one. Sorry, fellas. Over,” he says. In the engine, they all stare at the handset in the radioman’s hand.

Steve lets out a breath. “Any of you have experience repairing tracks?” The conductor and engineer just stare at her, still not sure what to do with her or her questions, but one guy sitting up near the front nods.

“I’m a brakeman now,” he says, “but I worked on the lines for two years.” Though he’s shorter than Steve, his shoulders are ropey and broad. 

“Alright,” she says. “If I clear it, can you survey the damage?”

“I could do,” he says, “but how are you gonna —”

“Leave it to me,” she says, already opening the side door and swinging out of the engine.

The rock slide is narrow, one clean fall right across the tracks and over the edge, and while there’s a pile of boulders through the center, most of the fill is in smaller rocks. “Find some buckets,” she says to the brakeman, “and anyone who can haul.” 

He blinks at her, doesn’t move. Stifling a sigh, Steve climbs, sure-footed, to the top of the rock pile and, bracing, sets her shoulders against one of the big, unwieldy boulders. Strength wells up in her not like the quick burst of running an all-out sprint or the focused power of a thrown punch, but in the heavy, close force of her thighs pulling tight, of centering her balance low, of making her body into a compact, dense pressure. With one grunting shove, the boulder shifts, then shifts again, then rolls down the jumble of rock and right off and over the sheer edge. She glances back at the brakeman, gives him a little wave, and he startles and turns. 

She has three more boulders shifted by the time folks start pouring out, buckets and shovels in hand. Nearly all of the dancers have shown up, Steve is gratified to see, and with them a handful of other passengers; with a little direction they start up bucket lines, shoveling them full of the smaller rocks before sending them down the line to be dumped over the edge. Steve keeps up with the boulders, shifting and shoving, and slowly the pile diminishes under her feet.

The first drops of rain she hardly notices, mingled with the sweat that rolls down her back, but at the first great clap of thunder she pauses and looks up. Cloaked in a turbulent swath of leaden clouds, the sky seems much closer now, pressing in on the mountain peaks like it might beat them down. Luckily, as the rain picks up, they’ve cleared away enough for the brakeman — Roy, she learns — to look at the tracks and make a diagnosis. In an even greater stroke of luck, nothing much has shifted, spikes still driven into neatly parallel ties, the tracks unbroken, and Steve feels relief in the slight burn of her shoulders.

Roy conducts the dirt-worn passengers back on board, Steve trailing behind to shift the last couple of rocks. As the engine rumbles back to full fire behind her, she pauses to look out over the fall of the mountains and the quickly-rushing storm that approaches, cloaking the nearest peaks in a dim hazy of falling rain. What had seemed an almost unlimited expanse of rugged peaks and bright, clear air presses close to her now, jagged crevices harsh and serriform as a knife. A gust of wind batters against her; the rain starts to sluice. The storm is almost upon them.


	4. Chapter 4

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Bucky sits on watch as the dawn breaks. The sun is crimson red with smoke and dust, bathing across the wreckage in the valley below. The stench of blood, so fucking familiar, has deepened, its metallic decay made more pungent by the dry, still air, the settling of dirt. Busted trucks and tanks blown out by the German eighty-eight guns are backlit, like some grotesque stage, and in the rising light she cannot yet see the bodies of those who fell. She cannot see the Germans, either, but she knows they’ve repositioned themselves, further from the blockade of Allied debris.

_March 1943, El Guettar Valley, Tunisia_

“Go, go, go!” Corcoran’s yelling in her ear even as she turns back toward the hill. Under her feet, the mud shifts unsteadily, throwing her in lurches and starts as she tries to mount the slope alongside the rest of their troop. Grappling for purchase with her elbows, rifle clutched preciously to her chest, Bucky makes some advance up the hill; she can see, through her muck-blurred lashes, that Lee and Garfield do the same at her left flank. Her ears are ringing. She thinks Corcoran might be issuing another order, something beyond _get to the top and hold it, god dammit_ , but if so she cannot hear it. Behind them, the heavy artillery continues, great booming thrusts that shake the ground. 

The rumble of the Panzer tanks throbs heavily against her skull, and all her instincts scream at her to go _up up up_ , away from the roar. At the routing at Kasserine last month, Bucky had seen a Panzer tank run merrily across the battlefield, bullets glancing off its hull like spitballs, and turn at a sharp ninety-degree angle to plow through the long trench line dug by the 104th Infantry. Very few could scramble out quickly enough to avoid being crushed. _Up up up_ her body says, across a terrain too steep for the tanks to follow.

A clod of dirt jumps in front of her; it takes two hazy, long seconds for Bucky to realize they’re being shot at. “ _Go_ ,” she shouts, voice hoarse and inaudible to even her own ears, as she scrambles harder. More bullets: they hit the mud with _thunks,_ almost comical, like a bad sound effect on a radio play, though Bucky knows it’s just her blown-out ears. The sun’s against them, falling through the sky directly behind this goddamn hill and glaring bright against the slow, grit-blurred blink Bucky musters in defense from time to time. What her senses tell her, therefore, is the sucking feeling of the mud against her boots and elbows, the taste of blood and dirt and bile in her mouth, and the putrid stench of fear — shit and blood and vomit — underlying the acrid, steel tang of shot gunpowder. 

Bucky’s scrambling over a rough crevasse of rock when Corcoran, just behind her and to the right, makes a raw, jerking motion and stops. She shoves over to his side, scraping hard against the jagged edge of the rock, and grabs his elbow to pull him back up. He’s dead weight; she pushes against him; her eyes throw up shards of strange, blinking colors anytime she tries to focus on something, but she can see the dark, spilling pool at the base of his neck. His helmet sits crooked, and his head lolls when she shoves at him again.

“Goddamn,” she says, she thinks, out loud. Leibman is on Corcoran’s other side, and when he looks up at Bucky, his eyes, under the brim of his helmet, are bright in the muddy swath of his face. She shakes her head, jerks it upward toward the peak. Pushes onward.

They reach the top. The spray of bullets has stopped, lackadaisical booms from the eighty-eight guns sounding occasionally, as though the enemy has bored of the whole thing. The top of the hill is a shallow plateau, bare bits of scrub grass providing meager cover, but from there they can see this corner of the winding valley well enough to see that no one has followed them. The hill is too steep for tanks or armored trucks, and below them in the winding crevasse of the road, half-a-dozen half-tracks and two tanks make a creeping advance toward the German line, slowed by the narrowness of the pass and the bodies that have already fallen. The rest of the 107th is scattered; in the hazy, falling light, Bucky can make out a smattering of men on the plateau across the valley from them, maybe two or three squads; the rest, she doesn’t know. 

Backing far enough away from the edge, the squad hunkers down, squatting on their heels in a rough cluster. Bucky does a quick head count: Lee, Edison, Garfield, Oakley, Rentz, Stearn, Leibman, Stoler, which means only Corcoran fell. That also means that she and Lee are in charge. 

“Anyone hurt?” They each take stock of themselves, Bucky included, patting down their bodies in an absurd pantomime. She finds one sleeve of her uniform ripped open, skin underneath tender with a narrow, bleeding scratch, but no other injuries. Rentz is missing a chunk of his calf, ripped out neatly with a bullet, and twists sideways to press at it with his hand. Stearn helps him with a bandage and some sulphanilamide powder, efficient and quick. 

Bucky peers back over the edge of the hillside. The strange tableau has stilled; while some of the rear tanks pull back, likely moving deeper into the valley to find a different egress point, those in the front that can still fire do. This isn’t even the mire of it, just one small exit to the great mountain passes they’re trying to overcome. Terrain Rommel’s Afrika Korps knows far better than B Company or any of the Allied infantry. Well enough not to drive themselves up against a battalion of anti-tank guns positioned in a narrow valley with no way out, at least, which puts the Germans well ahead at this particular moment. 

Turning to Lee, Bucky mutters, “Any ideas?”

“Plenty,” he says. “Most involve fucking off back to Algiers.” She resists rolling her eyes, and he says, confirming what she’s already thinking, “We don’t have orders to retreat, not yet.”

“Yeah,” she says. “We can probably hold up here, for a while. Advance again in the morning.” He nods; without light, there’s too much risk of walking right off the edge of the plateau. They’ll sit tight, wait for orders.

++

Bucky sits on watch as the dawn breaks. The sun is crimson red with smoke and dust, bathing across the wreckage in the valley below. The stench of blood, so fucking familiar, has deepened, its metallic decay made more pungent by the dry, still air, the settling of dirt. Busted trucks and tanks blown out by the German eighty-eight guns are backlit, like some grotesque stage, and in the rising light she cannot yet see the bodies of those who fell. She cannot see the Germans, either, but she knows they’ve repositioned themselves, further from the blockade of Allied debris. 

She’s about to wake the others when she sees a single figure making its way up the base of the hill. In an instant, Bucky drops to her belly and props up her Springfield, looking through the grime-blurred sight. All she can make out at first is a bowed head in a steel helmet, but as he scrambles closer, she can make out the US Army uniform. Standing, she nudges Lee and Garfield awake, trusting them to rouse the rest of the squad, and picks her way across the plateau to meet the newcomer. 

“You in charge here?” the man says, out of breath. He’s wrecked, ashen and wan, and his mud-crusted hands keep gripping at the air like he’s searching for something to steady himself. 

Bucky shrugs. “Good as,” she says. In this little corner, anyway; she and Lee are the highest-ranking members of their section, and at the moment anyone higher on the ladder in B Company is separated from them by a valley and an uncomfortable amount of wreckage. 

“Orders from Gafsa,” he says. “All efforts are to be concentrated on taking and holding the exit roads.” He looks around, one hand held up to his brow like a boy scout. “Over there,” he says, pointing north-east. Bucky nods; she knows. The Germans have likely relocated to the only access point into the pass in this area, which can barely be called a settlement, a small smattering of buildings at the delta of this narrow road. The Allies have to take it if they have any chance of advancing through the mountains toward Bizerte and Tunis. 

“Any more men coming?” she asks. “The advance at Mareth?”

He shakes his head. “Holding, but poorly” he says. “It’s all they can to not get routed; they’re not going anywhere.” 

Bucky sucks in through her teeth. “Okay,” she says. “We’ll do it. You joining us or heading back?”

He shakes his head. “I’ve got —” he gestures across the way, where a couple of men have also started milling nervously.

“Yeah,” she says. Shading her eyes, she looks as far down the valley as they can see, gesturing for Stearn to lay out the map. 

“We’re here,” Stearn says, pointing to an unnamed elevation ridge. A few more kinks of the road north-easterly is the access point. 

“Tell them we’ll advance from this side,” she says, drawing her finger along the edge of the ridge. The Germans will have men positioned along its elevation closer to the settlement, but she’s hopeful if they stick close to the edge they’ll be able to avoid being seen. The messenger nods, tucks his helmet back on, heads down the other side of the slope.

“Okay,” she says to Lee, who’s come up to her side. Everyone’s awake now, eating rations; most of their eyes are on her. With the exception of Corcoran, their section has survived, and there are maybe two dozen men on the plateau across from them, which means that if no other squads from B Company have fared so well and are, in fact, in the vicinity, they’re thirty or so men against god knows how many Germans. “How do you feel about a suicide mission?”

He makes a show of surveying the terrain, bathed golden in the cresting sun. “Seems as good a day for it,” he says, resigned. 

Bucky watches the messenger pick his way across the broken detritus of the valley. Bodies remain, in between the hulking lumps that used to be armored tanks, but the injured were gathered up in twilight. His steps are careful and weary; command is holed up at Gafsa, which is fifteen miles away, and he’s on foot. The air has fallen still, not even whistling across the plateau, and so when the gunshot comes, it is a clear, loud crack wrenching across the landscape, reverberating through the valley.

The messenger falls, crumpling like a dropped doll. Bucky flattens to her belly, dragging her rifle to tuck under her arm. Beside her, Lee has had the same thought and already has his scope out, intent on the direction of the shot. A glimmer of movement catches Bucky’s eye just as Lee murmurs, “Behind the half-track at your two-o’clock.”

The shooter is obscured by the vehicle, but the tip of his gun is just visible. “We need to draw him out,” she says. 

“Grenade?”

“Can you throw it that far?”

Lee has already gauged the distance to the target, likely even more accurately than Bucky. With no sign of any other Germans, it seems like a bit much over one man, but a decent sniper covering this whole section of the valley could prove disastrous for their advance. They don’t need to blow him up, just get him out from behind cover.

“I can’t,” he says, “but I bet Stoler can.” Bucky grins. Stoler had been recruited by the Cincinnati Reds after pitching for Kent State, had been rounding out his second season when his number came up. Lee gestures him over and explains what they need him to do. After a moment, Stoler nods and crawls away from the group a bit, to where he can lob the grenade up behind the sniper. He stands, pulls the pin, and throws it in one practiced movement, and it falls half-a-dozen yards from the sniper. A long pause, then — 

Bucky steels herself against the explosion, forcing her eyes to stay open and watching, and is rewarded with a stumbling figure appearing in the split-second wake of the blast. She exhales, pulls the trigger; he falls to the ground and doesn’t get back up. When she pulls back and looks across the valley, a couple of men from the other squad are gesturing for attention. She looks back through the scope; one of them gives her a sharp salute, and she can just see the gleaming white of his teeth in a broad grin.

With the way cleared for now, Bucky sends Oakley across the way to liaise with the other squads — they send their own man down, and the two meet in the middle, behind a blown-out Sherman tank, and confer for a few minutes before scrambling back up their respective hills. “Okay,” he says, out of breath as he crests the rise. “They sent a scout out last night — the Germans are holding the entry point, but with only a few trucks and sentries placed at either side. Their Sergeant thinks they can make it cleanly to the north side if we can take the south, but their best marksmen are down.”

“So they won’t be able to take the sentry unless they get too close,” Bucky says. “Well, guess it’s our job, then.”

It takes them most of the morning to creep closer to the settlement, the squads on either side of the valley moving low to the ground to take what little cover the scrub grass provides. As they near the final curve before the valley widens and the slopes level off, Bucky stops the squad and kneels in the grass with Lee, to find the sentries. They have the advantage, on higher ground with the sun directly above, and it doesn’t take long before Bucky sights a small wooden structure, squat to the ground and the same dull color as the surrounding dirt. There’s no movement; they creep closer, leaving the rest of the team to wait. 

Lee keeps his sight on the sentry post closest as Bucky turns hers across the valley, seeking out its twin. It’s nestled in better, the natural rock providing coverage, but this time she sees the sentry himself, half-obscured by the hut but visible enough. She gestures to Lee, who gives her the calculations from his wind gauge, confirming her planned trajectory. The sentry doesn’t move, not until Bucky’s shot lands and his body gives a rough jerk before falling still. 

By the time she’s taken her shot, Lee already has his sights on the other sentry, who draws cautiously out at the noise, and when he signs that he has a shot, Bucky gives the go-ahead. 

They flash an A-OK across to the other squad and start moving in, fast; the gunfire will have alerted the rest of the Germans. 

The best they can do, to start, is reach the edge of the ridge and start shooting. It nets them most of the men still scrambling around for cover, before the single tank, parked in the center of the road that leads into the valley, rumbles awake. 

“Fall back!” Bucky yells, and they pull away, out of sight. She can just see the men on the other ridge do the same, and she hopes their Sergeant has something close to the same idea she’s having just now. The ground in front of them explodes with the impact of a shell; they have little time. There’s only one tank, she figures; it can’t shoot at all of them at once. 

Another shell blasts a crater into the ridge, sending the ground crumbling away as Bucky’s men scramble back. Past the ringing in her ears, she can just hear gunshots as the other squad fires. and, in one decisive move, she slides to the side, looking over far enough to see the barrel of the Panzer swing away from them. 

Going over the edge feels like jumping into the ocean: the blinding panic of not knowing what your feet will find. The rocky ground rips roughshod against her khakis, but she holds tight to her rifle as she slides down, the ridge too steep to walk upright, and by the cascade of gravelly soil around her, the men are keeping pace. Bullets scatter across the rise, kicking up dirt far too close to them; most of them curse under their breath but they all keep moving. 

A few feet before the bottom, Bucky rolls to her feet and starts shooting before she’s even hit flat ground. The only cover on this side is offered by the paltry flat walls of the few buildings, and they move in pairs to the first, then the second, creeping closer. Bucky keeps the rear, offering cover as her men move across the open spaces, and she registers a few hits: one glancing shot off Edison’s shoulder, a hit to the calf that has Stearn cursing and jumping the last few steps, and one that blows Leibman’s helmet off and leave him blinking and stunned until Stoler shoves him from behind. 

Once they’re all behind the nearest building to the cluster of German troops stationed around the tank, Bucky leans around the corner, squeezing off a couple of shots while making quick calculations. “Stoler —” she says as she draws back behind the building; he nods. “Do you think you can get a grenade 20 yards, over the heads of a dozen men, and into the track of the tank?”

Stoler narrows his eyes, picturing the logistics. “Probably?”

“Great!” Bucky says, cheerfully. She loads a new charger into the Springfield. “Lee and I will give you cover. On three, two, one —” She rolls out from the edge of the building, enough room for Lee to follow, and from the ground squeezes off a series of shots taking down five of the men, starting from the left. Lee starts from the right, and when there’s only three men left shooting at them, Bucky sees a projectile arch neatly above their heads to land behind them, bouncing off the ground and into the track well of the tank. Another second and —

It mostly explodes outward, taking down the last men, but as the smoke shifts, Bucky sees that it has blasted three of the front axles, enough to leave the tank listing a bit to the side. Signaling the men to advance, Bucky leads them up the alley between buildings and toward the tank. The top hatch opens, cautiously, as though to investigate the grenade damage; Bucky pauses, lifts her rifle, and shoots straight into the gap. It clangs closed. 

A group of men from the other side rally and shoot from the cover provided by the listing tank, but between Bucky’s men and the troops on the other side, the force is depleted to only a dozen or so men that Bucky can see. Their commander does the math, too, and barks an order to his men, who put down their arms. 

They shuffle their prisoners into an empty shed; it’s rickety, but with a guard on it should do. Oakley bars the door, then shoves a blasted-off panel from the half-track beneath the handles, wedging it against the ground. It’s not until Stern is off on a motorbike to report the capture of the settlement to command at Gafsa that Bucky looks around and allows herself to realize that they’ve managed, stupidly and with no command experience, mostly by sheer dumb exhilaration, to successfully capture and hold an enemy outpost. She laughs aloud, under the bright-day sun, and the sound is gritty against her teeth.

++

_September 1943, Tyrrhenian Sea_

The kinds of ships used for landing convoys have already become familiar, after one long trans-Atlantic crossing and a tense voyage around the coast of Portugal and through Gibraltar: overcrowded, smelly, and raucous with the pounding thrum of the engines and boisterous belly-aching of the men. Bucky is not over pleased to be on one again, but at least this time it’s only a matter of hours until they are, once more, dumped unceremoniously into landing boats to try to wrest another foreign beach from the hands of the Axis. She’s hardly the only one happier to face the end of a Kraut rifle than the harsh roiling of the sea or the drilling boredom of billeting in Bizerte.

Leaning back on her bunk, Bucky props her feet up on her pack. Her stomach has mostly settled from the morning, but she still breathes through her mouth to avoid the stench of those whose guts continue to complain. In the bunk next to her, Lee reads a copy of _The Grapes of Wrath_. He’s offered to lend it to Bucky when he’s done, and she’ll probably take it, though she doesn’t know that she needs to re-live the dragging hunger of the 1930s. She has a handful of pulp novels in her pack, aliens and mysteries all in the far-off future, but her stomach still swims queasily when she tries to concentrate on the hairline cracks in the bunk above her, so she doesn’t want to think about words on a page right now. 

She must drift off, despite the noise and the smell; it still surprises her, that she can sleep with this press of crude humanity making the air heavy and thick. She wakes to Lee nudging at her ankle with his toe, across the narrow fifteen inches between their bunks. 

“Barnes,” he says. “It’s time.” His face is pale. Bucky feels a quick rush of guilt at his waking her; she’s the Sergeant of their squad now, awarded a new chevron after Corcoran’s death and their successful holding of the road into El Guettar. They’d found out, after two long weeks holding there, guarding the access point, that they’d lost so many men during the main battle, miles away, that much of the remaining forces had retreated first, to regroup and do exactly what their little corner of B Company accomplished: taking and holding individual hills and access points. It had, eventually, worked, and the Allies had, eventually, advanced through the mountains and worked their way to the coast, through multiple weeks-long dug-in battles.

Taking Bizerte had been nothing like the mountain battles leading up to it. Her mind doesn’t know what to do with the memories of families huddling in their homes or trying desperately to escape, of the screams of children, of pleading in a language she doesn’t need to know to understand. After the Germans surrendered, the only rebuilding the US Army had concerned itself with was the main roads south to Tunis and west to Annaba, the docks, and whatever buildings were necessary to house an army for what turned out to be five long, slow months of waiting. In the meantime, the Tunisian people rebuilt homes shattered by artillery and picked their way through the streets without looking at the soldiers.

When orders finally came down that they were heading eastward across the sea and into Italy, Bucky had felt a hot rush of shamed relief at escaping the guilty boredom of holding in Bizerte. They drilled, they patrolled; Bucky wrote jovial letters to Steve about going to the beach that weren’t, in fact, too distant from the truth. Long, hot marches up and down the sand, eyes stretched out across the long, blurring horizon scanning for ships, got really fucking dull after the first couple of hours, so if the regularity of their uniforms got a bit lax and bare feet got dunked in the water nothing was said. Bucky never really ventured out deeper than her shins, anyway; even at the curling tip of Bizerte’s peninsula-protected harbor, the waves crashed heavy and angry enough for her.

The only benefit, as far as Bucky can figure it, of holding for months in a coastal city, is five months of regular mail service. She has a stack of letters tied up in her pack, now: news from the neighborhood and of her sisters, and short, bright stories of the road from Steve, with sketches of the many landscapes of America. Bucky’s letters aren’t getting to Steve on the regular, so their conversation is jumpy, inarticulate, but she reads and re-reads Steve’s words nonetheless. They are, on the whole, too cheerful by half, as though Steve has decided it’s her own personal duty to keep up the morale of the entire US Army, and Bucky’s favorite parts are when Steve slips into annoyed sarcasm or heated righteousness in either nagging at Bucky to take care or complaining about mooks she meets in her travels. 

Those are the only times when it doesn’t feel like it’s most of the world between them, an ocean and all the broad land of two continents pressing them ever further apart. Tucked in her breast pocket is a half-written letter to Steve, not ready to send yet. She might not send it at all; she’d started it the other morning, just after orders came down that they were to prepare to move out, and it, perhaps, lists toward sentimental. Melodramatic, even, nearly like something off a radio serial. It’s not that she needs to keep up her cheer for Steve the way she does for Ma and them — god knows she doesn’t want to make it seem like a lark, not to Steve who’s striving so hard to get herself shipped off over here — but it surprises her, at times, how easy it is to slip into things she wouldn’t ever let herself say aloud. There’s no one now to look askance if she writes something fond and mawkish, if she says something close to the truth like _I think about you all the time_ or _I miss you more than I figured could be possible_. Bucky aches for Steve’s voice even while she thanks every power she can think of — the rule-bound God Steve knows and the negotiable one Bucky’s mother taught her, the forgiving one spoken of by some of the less-severe nuns at school — that Steve is safe at home. This place isn’t for her: she would burn too bright and too quickly in the advancing fray of all that is wrong about humanity, the insistent knowledge that men spend generations working out how best to cause destruction. She would fight to her last: that has always been her fate, but Bucky cannot stomach the thought of it coming so soon, on the harsh stretches of the battlefield.

_Tainu_ , she thinks. _We have gone astray. Titanu– we have led others astray_. Not this time, though, not her: Steve is not astray, Steve is home and safe. If Bucky’s still alive in a month, she’ll have her second Yom Kippur of the war — of her war, anyway — and of her many sins, that will not be one. Last year she didn’t yet know Liebman and Edison, Liebman who observes as closely as he can — there’s no rest guaranteed, not on any day, and his only kosher food comes in month-old care packages — and Edison who found them some matzah on Passover and has a broad, clear voice when he says the kiddush. Last year, she murmured the familiar words of the Ashmanu but her single voice rang too quiet. 

In her memory, the Ashmanu is sharp and clear, words punctuated by the rhythmic thumping of a hundred fists in the synagogue. She wonders if she’ll ever feel the words that way again, the great heavy lifting up of a community together: _we have trespassed, we have dealt treacherously_. Now, she thinks _we have done violence_ and wonders if it will feel lighter if shared. If it’s something that can ever be lightened. 

Checking her pack again, Bucky tightens the straps down, pulling the rain cover over it snugly. The ship lurches to a halt a few minutes after Lee wakes her, and as for everything in the army, her unit waits their turn to clamor up the decks and go over the side into the landing vessels. With the engines off, the hull reverberates with every creak; the air in the hold sours with expectation and nerves. To her left, Lee stands with one hand clenching and unclenching, and close in front of her she can see small beads of chilled sweat roll down Garfield’s neck. 

This is a time for Shakespeare and poetry, she thinks; too bad she only reads bad pulp novels. As they wait, the unit chaplain makes his way through the hold, stopping to speak to groups of soldiers, to pray with some. When he comes by Bucky’s bunk, she asks, “What brand are you?”

He blinks, then says, mildly, “I’m a Methodist.” He doesn’t have the pinched look to his mouth of the priests she remembers growing up. He’s young, handsome even, with round cheeks like a kid. “But I happily serve any number of denominations.”

“I’m Jewish,” Bucky says; the letter’s on her dog tags, and all. Not out of bravery — she knows plenty of fellas choose to keep the little H off, as long as there’s a risk of falling in Nazi territory, and she respects ‘em just the same — but when they’d asked her mind had shot straight to her Ma, and how if Bucky falls she’s gonna have to keep truth of it secret anyway, and so she figures she can give her this.

“I’m still happy to talk, if you wish.”

They’re about to scale down the side of a ship in order to get into other, smaller ships and land on a beach to be shot at. _We have done violence_. There’s not a single thing she wants to say aloud right now.

“Thanks, padre,” she said. “I’m okay.” He pats her shoulder and moves on.

“B Company,” a voice booms down the hold; Bucky hefts up her pack and follows her Company above decks.


	5. Chapter 5

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> After nine months on the road together, the gals are generous with their time and attention to one another, and to Steve, and they’ve turned her into a decent enough performer. But she still feels a deep ache of envy watching the free and easy way they each have with their bodies, trusting their muscles — and each other — to catch them right each time. Steve has never: the closest she can imagine to that intuitive flow is the last few weeks at Camp Lehigh, training with Peggy, and feeling the itch under her skin that told her how very close she was each time she landed a punch.

_September 1943, Philadelphia_

Steve shows up to the theater on her own, a few minutes early for the meeting Bennett’s called. It can’t be anything bad, she figures; their crowds have been growing steadily through the months on the road and the tricks they perform are developing, too. Steve’s been working with Peterson to remodel the tank so that she can lift it in the final sequence. They’ve even added another four more girls to the chorus line and introduced a costume change halfway through.

Sitting down on the edge of the stage, Steve looks out at the dark, empty seats. Tonight, they’ll be bursting full with kids, families, folks on dates and outings, people looking for some lightness in a time beset by one pain after another. She won’t begrudge them that. 

The house lights flicker on, bringing with them a group from the chorus, and then a couple of the fellas from props. Folks trickle in; the last to show up are Hodge, who sits alone on the stage steps, and Bennett himself, who rushes in with a sheaf of papers fluttering in one hand. 

“All here? Good,” he says, not really waiting for confirmation. “As you know,” he starts, “after tonight’s show we head to New York for three shows.” 

New York. It’s been more than a year since Steve left the little apartment on Montague Street, more than a year since she saw Bucky, or Bucky’s family. She’s already written to Mrs. Barnes with tickets for the last night, and the thought of seeing her, and Rebecca, and all of them, sends her chest to aching. She _misses_ them, misses the home that she could always borrow. They’ve been writing her, just as they must be Bucky, with news of the neighborhood and of all the girls. Rebecca’s still at the office, but they’re doing war work now so she can’t talk about it. Susanna finished up with school in June, a full year early, and signed straight up for a job at the shipyard. In one letter, she’s enclosed a picture of herself in her coveralls and kerchief, looking far more suited to them than Steve is to her spangled version. Still in school, Miriam writes letters that are short but fierce, poured full of every angry word she encounters. They break any illusion Steve had that she and Bucky had successfully kept secret Steve’s predilection for fighting from the younger girls; Miriam, like her sister before her, has successfully weaseled boxing lessons out of Mr. Barnes, and she tells each scrappy little argument and fight with such gusto that Steve can’t help but be proud. Miriam always sends her letters folded intricately into precise little packages, name signed across the seams, and tucked into Mrs. Barnes’s envelope, so Steve suspects that she is perhaps the only one allowed to be proud of Miriam’s righteous fists.

“Once we’re finished in New York,” Bennett is saying; Steve wrenches her mind away from meanderings of home, “we’ll be continuing the tour in London, then for troops on the occupied front in Europe and North Africa.”

Steve’s throat pounds; around her an excited cheer goes up from the dancers. Bucky’s in North Africa, she thinks — after Tunisia was taken by the Allies, Bucky had sent a letter full of bullshit about the beautiful beaches, as though Steve didn’t know when she wasn’t saying something, even in writing. She might see Bucky, she might — god, she might see Bucky. 

Marge jostles against her, grinning widely, and it takes a deep, concentrated effort for Steve not to sob. The Barnes home she misses like the loss of something that once brought great comfort, a childhood toy, a favored dress; Bucky she misses like she’s been gutted. Like part of her has been spooled out across the Atlantic and every tug that separates them further threatens evisceration. 

With a hard swallow, she manages to smile back at Marge, and then smile wider as the ache in her stomach throbs promisingly to life.

++

The show goes well; everyone is so thrilled by the news that the kicks are higher, the grins more sparkling. Backstage, Steve wipes her makeup off with cold cream and tries to ignore the way her blood pounds, insistent, as though now that seeing Bucky again is a possibility, her body has decided to drive her to leave right away.

From behind her, Dolores swings her arm around Steve’s neck, pulls them close together. In the mirror, her crimson grin is blinding. “Come on, Stevie, Europe! Not exactly the way I always dreamed it, but I’ll take it.” Steve smiles, and Dolores kisses her cheek, wet and warm, and leaves a red streak behind. “You gonna come out for a drink with us?”

“What happened to ‘I’m never drinking again’?” Steve says, mimicking Dolores’s pained, hungover groan from yesterday morning. “Gin is the devil’s work, I think you said.”

“So I’ll drink whiskey,” she says, with a wicked grin, cheek still pressed tight to Steve’s. Most of her is pressed tight to Steve, in fact, arm tucked close to the curve of Steve’s neck, breasts against her shoulder. Steve swallows.

“Not sure that sounds like a better plan,” she says, but she follows Dolores out the door. 

++

The press of people when they push through the door catches in Steve’s throat, the heavy, damp, sour air clinging. She follows closely on Dolores’s heels, feeling too broad, too clumsy already. The last time she was in a dance hall this small and hot and sticky was with Bucky, who sat next to Steve at the bar and bought her a Schlitz, looking out for fellas to grab and foist on Steve. It was terrible, Steve hated it, and after trodding on the feet of two different men, she’d grabbed Bucky’s arm to drag them home. Bucky hadn’t danced once that night, just tracked Steve’s awkward, fumbling attempts while drinking her way through a few beers. Bucky liked to dance; it had taken Steve ages to figure out that the kind of dance hall where Bucky could find a fella to take Steve for a spin or two wasn’t the same kind where Bucky could hold out her hand to a gal and give her a twirl.

A couple of the gals head straight toward the dance floor, eyes out for likely partners. The hall is crowded with soldiers, neat-pressed wool and rakishly angled peaked caps everywhere the eye falls. Steve keeps her gaze resolutely on the back of Dolores’s head, bouncing dark curls above the winged curve of her shoulder blades. Dolores throws a mean elbow, and gets them up to the front of the bar in short order, leaning up on her toes to catch the attention of the bartender. 

“Ladies,” the bartender says as he steps over. His gaze drags over Dolores, taking in the deep, curved vee of her neckline and the golden olive glow of her skin, and then skips to Steve. She flushes and looks down as it lingers. 

“A champagne cocktail for me and a —” Dolores looks over at Steve.

“Um. A sidecar,” Steve says. Mostly, if she and Bucky drank they had beer, but she remembers Bucky buying her a sidecar, and then another when she liked the sweet heat of it going down her throat, to celebrate the Post Office mural finishing. Years ago, now; the sharp, rich, citrus taste mingles with a half-remembered feeling of Bucky’s elbow tucked up with hers, of walking in step down a sidewalk with the indeterminate, uncaring crowd of half-past midnight. 

The bartender sets up two delicate champagne coupes and pours their drinks deftly; Steve slides a couple dollar bills across the table, knowing that with her Army bonus for Project Rebirth she’s more comfortable than whatever they pay Dolores and the other gals in the chorus. 

A high-top table opens up on the edge of the dance floor, and Dolores wriggles her way between the press of bodies to claim it, thunking her glass triumphantly on the tabletop. She grins at Steve and then clinks their glasses together; Steve’s sidecar sloshes dangerously near the edge. “To Europe,” Dolores says. Her voice is bright and clear against the throbbing buzz of the hall, and when she speaks and Steve can focus, narrow in on one clear voice, the constant press of noise — all the creaking, pulsing, whispering sounds that Steve still isn’t used to filtering through — recede, just a bit. 

“To Europe,” Steve echos, and takes a sip of her drink. It still burns a little going down, warming up her mouth, but this time it doesn’t make her cough. Such well-behaved lungs she has now.

“Do you know,” Dolores says, looking down at her glass, “the champagne coupe was modeled on the breast of Marie Antoinette herself?” She slides her fingertips up the stem to linger at the base of the gently rounded bowl. The warmth in Steve’s cheeks, a pink flush from the heat of the room, intensifies. 

“I —” she swallows. Dolores brings the coupe to her mouth, takes a sip. Looks at Steve, then slides her glance away. When she sets the glass down, a crimson half-circle marks the rim, and her mouth is shiny. “I didn’t know that,” Steve says, finally. There’s a smeared pink crescent on her own glass; it feels very small in her hand. Dolores doesn’t say anything else, but after a few moments her gaze slips back to Steve, catching Steve’s eye where she’s watching Dolores and no one else. 

“Would you like to dance?” Dolores asks. Steve’s not sure if she’s asking so that she can make space for Steve to find a partner, or if she’s asking for herself, but either way — 

“Maybe in a bit,” she says, instead of the _no_ that is on her lips. “I think I’d like to watch, first.” Dolores nods, leaning her elbow on the table and angling so she can see the dance floor. Most of the other gals had made their way there immediately, and the music is bold and loud, trembling under Steve’s skin and just this edge of too loud in her ears.

Bess has found a very tall Marine, whose arms are long enough to spin her without her flaring skirt brushing his legs. Lizzie trades herself between two partners, and with each little kick the lights glitter off her silver shoes. There is a half dozen of their friends out on the dance floor — everyone but Steve and Dolores who’d come out that night — and every one of them, naturally, outshines the rest of the press of people swaying and twisting to the music. 

At a lull between songs, the dancers break apart, some ready to switch partners, others red-cheeked and looking for a drink. Picking back up again, the band opens a fast tune, nothing Steve recognizes, and with a brilliant smile, Bess grabs Aggie’s hand, abandoning her Marine, and they immediately swing into a Lindy, their feet moving even more swiftly than they do in lulls in practice, when their spirits are up and they feel like a little competition. Even to Steve’s untrained eye, she knows they’re they best of the lot, real talents, and she can’t help but feel they deserve more than backing up Hodge’s lumbering Captain America act and her own stumbling woodenness. 

Space opens up on the dance floor as Aggie and Bess draw attention, and they fill it easily, with snapping, dramatic swing outs and footwork too fast to even follow. The crowd whoops and hollers as they dip, spin, and flip one another, perfectly evenly matched and performing each move with a gymnastic grace. 

After nine months on the road together, the gals are generous with their time and attention to one another, and to Steve, and they’ve turned her into a decent enough performer. But she still feels a deep ache of envy watching the free and easy way they each have with their bodies, trusting their muscles — and each other — to catch them right each time. Steve has never: the closest she can imagine to that intuitive flow is the last few weeks at Camp Lehigh, training with Peggy, and feeling the itch under her skin that told her how very close she was each time she landed a punch. 

“You could do that, you know.” Dolores is right at her elbow; their arms brush together, bare.

Steve looks back out to the dance floor, in time to catch Bess flipping over Aggie’s arm and landing neatly on her feet. “I don’t think so,” she says, with a laugh.

The song stops with a trilling little drum roll, and the people circled around the dance floor clap as Aggie and Bess take one last spin. They make their way off the dance floor, and as the band starts up again, folks move to fill in the empty space, taking up again with renewed energy.

“I need a _drink_ ,” Aggie says, hands leaning on their table. Dolores gives her a wry little toast, a tip of her coupe in the air, and she grins, broadly, touching Dolores’s shoulder as she pushes past toward the bar.

“You were amazing,” Steve says. Bess grins at the breathless tone of Steve’s voice, bumps her with her elbow in thanks.

“Don’t you think Steve could be a good dancer?” Dolores says. Bess laughs, then catches herself, clapping a hand over her mouth.

“Well, I mean,” she says, apologetically to Steve. “You’re not exactly one for the stage.”

“Not all dancing happens on a stage,” Dolores says. Something unspoken passes between them before Bess lifts an eyebrow and drops her chin, conceding. 

The next song is slower, a gentle swing, and when Dolores gulps down her drink, chin tilting back and throat a long, pale line, and thunks the coupe to the table, Steve can’t help but give in to her offered hand.

“Luckily I know how to lead,” Dolores murmurs, her mouth near Steve’s ear. One hand she holds firmly to Steve’s hip, the other grips Steve’s hand. They take a few steps, haltingly. “Let me lead,” Dolores says, more insistent, and Steve draws a deep breath, tries to let her body flow into the gentle guiding press of Dolores’s hands. “Better,” Dolores murmurs, as they make their way across the dance floor, just another couple in the crowd. 

Steve feels damp under her arms and warm all up her chest. The way Dolores maneuvers her is familiar, like Bucky’s hands on her in their tiny sitting room, finagling her this way and that around their steamship of a sofa. This time, Steve feels solid in her hands, not fine-boned and biddable; she’s two inches taller than Dolores and aware of the way her dress clings and shifts around her muscles. 

“You’re doing great,” Dolores murmurs, her breath a puff against Steve’s neck. Bucky had said just the same, before Steve trod on her toes, perhaps just a bit deliberately, and she’d dropped her on the sofa with mock outrage. This time, she ducks her head, letting her temple brush against the bold sweep of Dolores’s hair, and feels the way her body leans into Dolores, willingly, without thought. 

“I’m having fun,” Steve says, aware that it sounds like surprise. Dolores laughs, loose and free, and spins Steve out, twirling their entwined hands above Steve’s head. 

When Steve steps back in, very nearly smoothly, Dolores says, “ _Good_ ,” like she’s answering something Steve hasn’t yet said. 

++

When Dolores kisses her, full on the mouth and a little wet, open-lipped, just inside the door to Steve’s room at the boarding house, Steve has a shocking, flashing thought that they’ve left something marked on her skin, all those thoughts she’s had, something that Dolores — and god knows who else — can read. She pulls her mouth away but nothing else; Dolores’s hands are on her hips and her feet are planted on either side of Steve’s. 

“How did you —” Steve says, a half-shocked murmur. 

“Lucky guess?” Dolores says, mouth curling up. “Very lucky, I’d say.”

“But I don’t — I haven’t ever —” Steve’s hands flex in the empty air; Dolores’s hips, unheld, are solid between them, a warm curve she can imagine. 

“With a girl?” Dolores says. She lifts one shoulder up. “It’s not that hard, Steve; I bet you’ll figure it out.”

“At all,” Steve says, which is certainly true, though it doesn’t seem to cover all the places her mind has stumbled and tripped and lingered. 

Dolores lifts her chin, looks at Steve’s face. They’ve only flipped on one lamp, and backlit Dolores’s face is smudged dark eyes and a parted mouth, faintly gleaming. “Huh,” she says. “I thought maybe you’d — with your friend.” Something must show in Steve’s face — is she destined to be so readable? — because Dolores laughs, softly, and says, “Hey, don’t look so shocked. Folks can go both ways.”

Steve just shakes her head. “We’re not like that,” she says, leaving quite firmly out any sense of how she’d _like_ to be.

“Okay,” Dolores says, and tips her mouth up, just brushing against Steve’s lips. It takes Steve one long second to drag her mind back to the sensation of that barest touch, away from everything that’s curving and curling around her memory of Bucky. She kisses back, opens her mouth and brings it to Dolores’s and feels the soft heat of it. 

They kiss for a while, long enough that Steve stops thinking about the way she’s leaning up against the door and starts thinking instead about the way Dolores has planted her feet around Steve’s, so that their thighs press together and Dolores has to lean up to kiss her, one hand at her hip and the other now at her shoulder and working its way down. It’s a bright little shock, the feeling of her thumb skating over the bare skin at the top of Steve’s breast and the knowledge that, unless Steve stops it, this will be more than just necking. 

She pulls back enough to whisper, “What if someone hears?”, gasping as Dolores’s hand finds its way inside the top of her dress to cup her breast. 

“Unless you are very loud, or they are very nosy, I think we’ll be safe,” Dolores says to her collarbone, her breath hot and amused. “Besides,” she adds, fumbling open another of Steve’s buttons, “we’re hardly the only ones in the troupe to engage.”

“What?” Steve says, shocked at both the revelation and the feeling of Dolores’s hand sliding into her brassiere, her fingertips petting over her nipple.

Dolores pulls back, just enough that she can see Steve’s face in the cast light of the bedside lamp. “Aggie and Bess have been gone for each other since Milwaukee; didn’t you notice?”

“No! Really? No, I didn’t.” She thinks back to a hundred little gestures that would have given it away, if only she’d been thinking, and feels her stomach roil. Not because she missed it, really, but because she knows she’s looked at them and thought of how she misses Bucky, of what it feels to be without a friend whose body feels like part of her own.

As she stills, a little stunned, Dolores mouths at her neck, saying, “Wasn’t meaning for you to be thinking about _them_ ,” and Steve coughs, brings her mind back to the way Dolores’s mouth feels on her skin. “You _do_ want this, yeah?” Dolores says, more seriously.

“Yes,” Steve says, breathless, and then, “ _yes_ ,” and then, “and maybe in the bed, too,” which leaves Dolores laughing, surprised and delighted at once. 

It’s — it feels absurd to call it a revelation, silly and perhaps a bit blasphemous all at once, but the way they touch each other, together, makes Steve know this new body in a way she hadn’t hoped. Dolores’s mouth skates over her collarbone, and she’s never seen it standing out, narrow and sharp with living just this side of hunger; she helps Steve out of her dress, then her slip and brassiere and panties and garters and stockings, and looks at her body, broad and strong and flushed with want, not fever. She goes down between Steve’s thighs, and puts her mouth on her, and licks her hot and soft and deep, and Steve feels the hot, wet pull of her body toward Dolores’s mouth, an ache that she chases with her hips canted up and her hands twisted in the disheveled curls on either side of Dolores’s head. 

When she peaks, it furls out from her center and spreads, a roiling shockwave, across her limbs; she falls back with one hand still stroking Dolores’s hair and the other clutching hard at her own hip. Dolores pulls back, her mouth slick and shining, and says, “You could kill a man with these thighs,” petting at the inside of one of them with a hand sticky with Steve’s wetness. Her eyes are dark, her mouth pleased. Steve pulls her up, aware of the way Dolores’s grin widens at the rough grappling, and kisses her wet mouth. 

“Maybe I’ll try that next,” she says against Dolores’s mouth, easy, like the Army didn’t create her on a lark and then leave her behind, and it’s light enough because Dolores giggles. Steve flips them over, no effort at all, and pushes her knee between Dolores’s thighs. Her eye makeup is smeared and her lipstick mostly left between Steve’s legs, and she looks up at her with delight. Steve kisses her, again, and thinks about the wet heat Dolores rubs against her thigh. She knows what to do, sure, she knows what she likes, and Dolores hasn’t been shy so far letting her know what she likes, but she still needs to run through it in her head: the slick against her leg, the sweaty stick of their bellies together, the hot smell of her, salt and sweet champagne, the viscous taste of Steve on her lips, the huff of each breath against the side of Steve’s nose, all of it enveloping, overwhelming, overtaking the dull hum of humanity on the other side of the window. 

When she does finally work her hand down between them, Dolores is velvet-soft and soaking; Steve fumbles against her tender skin and watches as her mouth drops open. The little, trembling movements of her lips tell her so much: how to move and what to repeat, until she finds the quick, stuttering movement that has Dolores gritting her teeth together and turning her head and thrusting up into Steve’s hand. It’s clumsy, messy, and good, so good, Dolores’s slick up her wrist and thigh and both of them sweating, panting. Dolores muffles her sounds against her own arm as she comes, eyes shut tight and harsh little breaths escaping between her teeth. 

They catch their breath, shoved in together in the narrow single bed, and then they start again. Dolores stays with her until morning, dozing and kissing and touching, then slips back to the room she shares with Marge before Mrs. Henderson, the fearsome proprietor of the boarding house and a believer in prompt and early breakfast, makes the wake-up rounds. 

++

The last New York show is bright, explosive; Steve is still brushing away glittering confetti as she makes her way from backstage to the lobby to find the Barnes family. They’re easily found; Miriam has grown since Steve left, and stands on her tip-toes waving wildly to catch Steve’s attention. Steve pushes through the crowds, and her instinct is to pull whoever’s nearest into a hug, but when she steps into the eager little circle they make there’s a pause, a breath. 

“You’ve shot up,” Mrs. Barnes says, shocked into politeness.

Steve looks down at herself, a little embarrassed; it’s not that she hadn’t thought about how they might react, it’s just that she hadn’t quite figured on a good story to tell. “I ate my veggies?” she says, more of a question than she intends, but they all laugh, a little stunned, and pile in for hugs.

They get her well caught up on the gossip back home, on Rebecca’s longer hours and the fella she’s been seeing — she flushes right up to her temples when she talks about him, but can still look Steve in the eye with a dazzling smile when she asks if she’s happy, so Steve figures he must be alright — on Susanna’s new welding job and the victory garden she’s dug into the tiny back yard, on Miriam’s boxing lessons and scrap metal collecting and tap dancing. Steve grabs Aggie as she walks by, introduces her to Miriam and tells her that Aggie’s practically Josephine Baker’s niece, and grins as Miriam’s mouth falls open, unable to collect herself to ask a single question for a long time. Before she walks away, Aggie gives Mrs. Barnes the address of her Momma’s dance studio, tells her to head on down there if Miriam wants to get serious about it.

It’s almost like home again, like they’re about to walk into the house for Shabbat, except for the space they’re all talking around. At a pause in the conversation, they all look at each other and away, no one quite wanting to be the first. A great, uncertain ache rises up in her chest, so she says, “Have you heard from —”

Mrs. Barnes looks at her with relief, like she might sob, but Mr. Barnes steps in, saying softly, “A letter two weeks ago. Healthy, safe. Somewhere in North Africa, we think.” Steve nods; she’s figured the same. 

“I miss her,” she says, very softly, and Mrs. Barnes tugs her close in for a hug, Rebecca tucking in tight behind her. They’re all about the same height now, and for one vast moment Steve misses being able to tuck up under Mrs. Barnes’s chin, just like she always could her own Ma, and feel small and safe. Mrs. Barnes hugs were rare, more so after Bucky hit adolescence and started refusing them, but they were all the more fierce for their scarcity. Rebecca pets one hand down Steve’s hair, a lazy, familiar habit, and when Steve finally steps back, Rebecca squeezes the back of her neck and drops her hand. 

“You’re a damned miracle, Steve,” Rebecca says, ignoring her mother’s lifted eyebrow at her language. 

“You better keep yourself safe,” Mrs Barnes says, and Steve gives her a tight nod, afraid anything else will spill tears across her cheeks. “If you see —” she bites off her words, but they all go sharp and tense.

“Tell her to come home safe,” Mr. Barnes says, squeezing her shoulder.

“I will,” she says, around the hard lump in her throat. She wants to say: _if I have to bring her home myself_. She wants to say: _not until we’re done_. “I will,” she says again, forcing it uncertainly into a promise.


	6. Chapter 6

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> They’re little more than cages, really, what they put them in. There’s six of them in this cell, seven in the next, and about the same just as far down as Bucky can see. No beds, no chairs: one plank too narrow to lie down, stained concrete ground, and a bucket in the corner. They mix them up, too: Bucky hasn’t seen a familiar face in hours, and the men who glance warily at one another in their cell are strange to her. She brings her mind to the little details of their uniforms, focusing down like she’s looking through the scope of her rifle. This guy’s patch, that one’s hat, the way they all wear the same exhausted scowl that must be on her face, too.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> From this chapter onward, there is a smattering of French dialogue. Mouseover to see the English translation, and forgive me any translation errors, as I'm relying on my decade-plus-old high school French and Google.

_October 1943, Azzano, Italy_

Later, Bucky will think about the moment when she knew it had all gone wrong. Or — maybe — she’ll manufacture that moment, pinpoint it in the frenetic, bloody action of the day, capture it in a glass bubble, constructed clarity. She didn’t know, not any more than she knows what will happen next, at the end of whatever road they march along; all she did know was that it was war, like Kasserine, like El Guattar, like the coast of Salerno, no matter that the weapons fired and killed more cleanly and more accurately than any she’s encountered before. The moment, therefore, might have been when that first blue light hit, slamming into Stern’s chest and blasting him ass over head clear across the trench, a fifteen foot span, so he’s dead long before he hits the muddy ground. It might have been when a strange little whirring device landed and stuck to the side of their Howitzer before imploding, collapsing the barrel like crumpling paper. 

It might have been when a regular, old, fucking bullet hit Lee right between the eyes while he crouched next to Bucky reloading. He fell backwards, off the ledge on which they stood and into the muck of the trench, and when she jumped down she tasted bile in her mouth. Maybe it’s that moment, when she shook him even though his eyes were glassy and blood, thick and tar-black, welled up from the neat little hole in his forehead. Or perhaps the moment when she wanted, so very desperately, to drop down to the ground, to let her rifle slide from her hands, to leave herself to what may come.

It might, really, be the moment when she fumbled at his belt and took his extra chargers, shoving them into her own pockets, and stood back up to shoot at as many fucking Germans as she could pinpoint in the narrow viewpoint of her scope. It’s sometime in there, because by the time the Germans cascade over the edge of the trench, shoving against her and landing fists on her chin, her ribcage, and then, strangely, securing her wrists behind her back, by that time it felt like a forgone conclusion that everything was fucked.

They line them up to walk in rows of six. The face next to her is unfamiliar; her shoulder aches with Lee’s absence. The soldiers mostly bark orders in German, but the intent is clear enough, and even if it weren’t, the pistol-whip to the back of the head any soldier receives for mouthing off would make it so. They march, and they mostly don’t speak, and in the hunched shoulders of all the men ahead of her, Bucky keeps seeing the broken bodies of those who fell. She’s the only one from her squad to emerge from the trench.

When the sun falls low in the sky, they finally stop and make camp. Well, the Germans do, digging a circle of foxholes and putting them, the prisoners, in the center, tied in pairs. She’s back-to-back with a guy from C Company, their wrists tied together between them, and they both try to sleep slumped against one another’s shoulders. Sometime in the night their hands tangle together, grip hard and tight. When they wake up, they’re untied and scrambled again, shoved into a fleet of trucks that arrived sometime in the small hours. 

The backs are open but guarded by a soldier on either bench holding more of those big, strange guns. They wear dark helmets, covering their faces, and uniforms as dim as midnight. The drive is long, on roads that aren’t quite roads but something older, tight switchbacks on steep inclines. When she looks out the back, she can see the front of the truck behind them as they crawl up, up, up, and then the truck turns and there’s nothing but empty sky.

When they finally stop, the sky is a dim grey blanket of twilight, muffling the air. She can’t see the ground when they drop the back gate of the truck, just jumps and lands on the sort of clinging mud that churns up under too many tires on a dirt road. In rows of two, they walk toward a yellow light, flickering like wheezy lungs, that turns out to be affixed to the peak of a formidable-looking warehouse. She tries to pay attention — one sliding door, padlocked chain, concrete floors — but the inside is lit up with the same jaundiced light, sallow and dim like the inside of a hangover, and her whole body aches too much to bring enough blood to her head for clear thought.

They’re little more than cages, really, what they put them in. There’s six of them in this cell, seven in the next, and about the same just as far down as Bucky can see. No beds, no chairs: one plank too narrow to lie down, stained concrete ground, and a bucket in the corner. They mix them up, too: Bucky hasn’t seen a familiar face in hours, and the men who glance warily at one another in their cell are strange to her. She brings her mind to the little details of their uniforms, focusing down like she’s looking through the scope of her rifle. This guy’s patch, that one’s hat, the way they all wear the same exhausted scowl that must be on her face, too.

Only one other guy wears the insignia of the 107th, along with a big, red mustache and an improbable bowler hat. One fella’s a Ranger, one wears the buffalo insignia of the 92nd — though, she didn’t need the patch to tell her that, as she’s heard they’re the only black U.S. unit on the front lines. They’ve also got a guy wearing a British Airborne beret and one guy in civvies, who by the looks of his glares at their captors, isn’t just an innocent civilian caught up in the fray. 

She feels disordered, lost. She thinks maybe they want that. Bucky looks down the line of cells, as far as she can see. No one’s talking yet, unless it’s to yell through the bars at the Germans, who glance back, unimpressed. Bucky turns to the man next to her and holds out her hand. “James Barnes,” she says, no rank, nothing. Just one person greeting another. “Most folks call me Bucky.”

He cocks his head, but takes her hand. “Bonjour,” he says, which must mean he’s Resistance. “Jacques Dernier. A pleasure,” he adds, with a wry grin, and Bucky can’t help a surprised cough of a laugh. 

Across the cell, the guy in the bowler hat looks suspiciously at the Ranger. “Taking in just anyone, I see,” he says, and Bucky thinks, yeah, of course, they’d mixed them up by race, too. If they’re all too busy fighting each other, no one’s going to fight the Germans.

“I’m from Fresno, asshole,” the Ranger says, and bowler guy lifts one eyebrow, but doesn’t say anything else. 

“You got a name, Fresno?” asks the guy from the 92nd, shooting a glance Bucky’s way. She spares a small, thankful thought that someone else is thinking the same way.

The Ranger glances him up and down, but finally holds out his hand and says, “Morita. Jim.” They shake hands; the other guy introduces himself as Gabe Jones, and it’s awkward, maybe, like the polite chit-chat and blessings she remembers from childhood Mass with Steve, but Bucky’s thankful. Their Airborne Brit is James Montgomery Falsworth, and Bucky doesn’t ask if he’s the third, the fourth, or Sir-Lord-His-Majesty, and the guy in the bowler is Dugan.

“Dum Dum,” Bucky says, before she can stop herself, because of course he is. That damned bowler. He’s famous across the 107th, mainly as an intransigent bastard. At her recognition, he colors up a bit, but covers it by tapping one finger to the brim of his hat and giving a broad wink. 

“So,” Dum Dum says, leaning in a little conspiratorially, “how soon do you think we can bust ourselves out of here?” Bucky can’t help but grin a little, because she doesn’t know where Dum Dum comes from, but that sounds like pure Brooklyn bravado.

“Where _is_ here, more importantly,” Bucky says. 

“Austria, if I’d have to guess, or nearly,” Jones says, quietly. At the raised eyebrows of the group, he adds, “Did you notice the giant mountains when they moved us from the trucks? We’re in the Alps, and we traveled north then northeast after the march, and heading toward Switzerland’s not going to do them any good.” 

Dernier says something quick in French; Bucky tries to grasp at the remnants of her grade school French classes and comes up with little more than the melody to _Frère Jacques_. To most of their surprise, Jones answers just as quickly, nodding something in affirmation.

“He heard them mention Kreischberg the last time the convoy stopped,” Jones explains. Falsworth exhales.

“Even if we could escape,” Falsworth says, glancing over his shoulder. The guards have mostly retreated, a dozen or so spread across the warehouse-like room, and are out of earshot. “We’d come out in the middle of the bloody Alps, some four hundred miles from the Allied front.” 

“So we’re fucked,” Morita says, flatly.

Dernier mutters something, and Jones laughs. “He says that victory without risk is a triumph without glory. Corneille?” he asks, lifting an eyebrow to Dernier, who grins, tips his head. 

“Enough of the fucking literature lesson,” Dum Dum says, with a roll of his eyes. “If we can’t get out right away, we wait. And watch.” 

“And remember who the enemy is,” Bucky says. They exchange shared, wary nods. 

Nothing happens for hours; they take turns sitting on the floor, napping against the bars. Bucky’s head feels heavy, stuffed full of cotton, and the little sleep she gets is fitful, and crowded with shadows. The greenish yellow mercury lights overhead permeate the warehouse so that the air has the otherworldly, jaundiced tone of indeterminate time, emphasized by the exhausted quiet that has spread through the cells, the sounds of sapped strength and disturbed sleep, erratic snores, rough coughs, and soft sobs. 

As her eyes drag open, heavy and dry, she catches sight of Jones and Morita, leaning up against the bars of the door and murmuring in low tones. The cell is just about big enough for the rest of them to sit with their legs straightened out, to give a little stretch to their march-hardened muscles, and in the corner next to Bucky, Dum Dum’s head lolls against the bars, heavy snores rustling his mustache. She stands, trying not to disturb him, and works her way over Dernier and Falsworth’s legs to get to the bucket in the corner.

The sour stink of humanity has already started to spread through the air; while no one in this cell has been sick, their bucket is still already half-full, each of them politely facing away when it’s in use. Jones nods at her before turning his shoulder away as she works open the buttons on her trousers. She might be too tired to be nervous about their close quarters, more uncomfortably intimate than even the worst foxhole she and Lee had shared. She’s been in this war a goddamned year and, honestly, no one’s given a shit how she peed before. It helps that she can piss standing up, well enough, at least, if the angle’s right, and that she’s hardly the only one to value what little privacy she can snatch. 

She’s not really certain she can expect to keep it a secret from the fellas in this cell; all she can hope, though, is that they’ll be kind enough to keep it to themselves and not make trouble. They seem decent enough, but she’s known plenty of men who seem decent at first introduction. At this point, she’s pretty practiced at not thinking about what could happen if the wrong person figures her out, and so she sends her thoughts away from the black-suited Germans and the press of riled, frustrated, angry men. 

Shoving her trousers down a bit, she squats over the bucket, angling herself toward the corner as much as she can. She can pretend she’s got the runs if need be; at least she’s not bleeding. If there’s one thing months of marching and the stress of an amphibious invasion is good for, it’s stopping up one’s monthlies, for hers have been intermittent, a lazy black sludge when they do show up. Buttoning back up, she wipes her hands on her thighs, the fabric already stiff with dried blood and muck. 

Dernier has roused, too, so the two of them take over for Jones and Morita. The look Jones gives her as they shuffle around sends a prickle to her neck, but his glance diverts away as quickly as it landed, and he doesn’t say anything, just giving her a tip of his chin as he settles in next to Dum Dum, whose snoring has grown in both intensity and frequency. If he jostles him a little with his elbow, making Dum Dum snort and breathe normally for a minute or two, well, Bucky keeps it to herself. 

++

Hours later — morning, probably, but there’s no natural light anywhere to judge — three German soldiers with glowing blue guns walk down the row of cells. One of them, gun at his hip and hands held together behind his back, looks into each cage as they pass, pausing slightly at some as if making notes. Inside each cell, the hostages shift uneasily.

They stop two cells down from Bucky’s. With the other two guarding the door, the leader opens it and, saying something brusque in German, grabs the arm of one of the soldiers. He jerks back, hauls one fist up, but before he can make his move, a sharp flash of blue light cracks the air, and he collapses to the floor. With a distasteful shove of his foot, the leader pushes his body to the side, and then gestures at a second man. The next guy goes with him without resisting.

When they leave, cell locked tight behind them, the body of the first soldier is still on the floor. 

They let them stew a bit, come back in an hour, two; this time two of them crank open the big steel doors and flood the warehouse with sunlight. Bucky wavers on her feet a bit, as though the confirmation of passing time reminds her body of its gnawing hunger, of the ache in her stiff muscles. The burst of sunlight makes her eyes swim, groggy from lack of sleep and a night adjusting to the sickly yellow light. 

Like earlier, the soldiers wear dark uniforms with helmets that cover their faces. In the haze of the morning, they had seemed automatons, some nightmarish robots from this strange science fiction world Bucky has stumbled into, but in the streaming sunlight they’re just over-dressed assholes. They go down the passageway in pairs, opening the cells and shuffling the inhabitants out. As a mass, they march through the labyrinth of cells and out into the daylight, tromping over a muddy yard and into another warehouse. 

As soon as the doors open, they’re assaulted with the clanking, grinding sounds of machinery at work; when they shuffle inside, the din pounds hard at Bucky’s skull. It’s a factory, quite clearly: heavy machinery, piles of uncut metal sheeting, wooden crates lining the back wall. So, they’ll be put to work, then, not to death. At least not right away.

The guards separate them, sending them in pairs to different machines. Even though next to no one actually understands their German commands and only a few seem to speak English, they make themselves quite clear with pointed gestural use of their guns. Bucky ends up alongside Jones next to an imposing hunk of metal, grating, and conveyor belts. For a moment, she wishes that maybe she’d worked for one of the factories, rather than the slaughterhouse, and then laughs, out loud and a little frantic, at the thought of wishing she were better suited to a fucking Nazi prisoner of war camp. 

“Still with us, Barnes?” Jones says, solid but quiet. Seems to be the kind of man he is, she thinks. Since that one odd, appraising glance last night, his eyes on her have been neutral, passive. 

She bites down on the laugh. “Yeah,” she says. “You know what this does?” She gestures to the machinery.

“Not a clue,” he says, prodding at its impassive face. Like the cages in which they’re kept, the equipment is new, shiny and pristine; that more than anything has Bucky’s stomach turning over. Whatever they’re going to be forced to make has its value to the Germans, value enough for a sparkling new compound in the Alps and a force of ill-tempered and well-equipped soldiers to run it. 

One of the Germans makes his way to their machine, flipping it on with a switch. It rumbles to life, loud enough to throb through Bucky’s skull, send her teeth to chattering. With a few efficient gestures, the German gets across the idea of what they’re to do: one to load sheets of metal into the gnawing maw of the machine, where they’re rolled into long tubes, and the other to direct the tubes down the conveyor belt and into the next machine, where the ends are crimped. Even unfinished, they’re unmistakable: massive flak gun cartridges, the size of a man’s thigh around. Bucky exchanges a look with Jones, who has clearly come to the same conclusion. A prod from the German’s gun, though, moves them into action, and Bucky starts lifting sheets of metal.

They work for hours, until Bucky’s sense of the world is reduced to the ache in her back and shoulders, the cuts that criss-cross her palms, the way her mouth, nose, and eyes seem filled with fine grit. It takes her a long series of furious blinks before she realizes it’s metal filings grinding off the machinery and free-floating in the air; they coat every surface and find their way into every soft membrane. 

The machine is clean and quick: she watches closely for the first hour or two, looking for weaknesses, places sensitive to sabotage, but finds nothing beyond just throwing something big and tough into the heart of the mechanism. Not that she’s against that, precisely, but she figures it will do little more than get her shot and a new machine sent in.

She doesn’t really get to consider it further in the coming days, for they’re shuffled around to different tasks each day: polishing the casings, assembling the shells, building out more of those strange black guns. She wonders if that’s their strategy — keep them jostled so that no one can get familiar enough to sabotage.

The thing is, they probably didn’t plan for Morita. On their very first night, when Bucky was ready to fall to the floor, so exhausted that she ached to the very marrow of her bones, Morita passed the word down the cells to collect any scraps of paper anyone had on them. Back to them, slipped surreptitiously through the bars, came water-stained stationery and ripped fly-leaves of books, airmail envelopes and now-defunct leave orders. He collected them all in a bundle, then pulling a pencil from his own boot, began to sketch. After a few minutes, he turned that drawing over, and asked Falsworth to describe the machine he had worked on. It only took them a week to assemble a full set of plans detailing the outer workings of every piece of machinery, with notes on their purposes and any weaknesses they might betray, a set of little chapbooks folded and tucked away underneath the piece of lumber that served as a bench in their cell.

Once he knew how the factory worked, he said, he could begin to plan its unmaking. 

She hopes he can, and before she is unmade herself. Her body aches with its labor, both in the factory and the work of staying closed tight and invisible when all around her are penetrating eyes. Behind their black helmets, shiny and unforgiving as the sea, the guards’ eyes are invisible, watching everything and nothing at once. The eyes of all the men around her aren’t hidden, though, and when one of them drags his eyes across her, too curious in too close quarters, she holds her breath and holds his gaze. They look away first, mostly. 

The five guys in her cell aren’t cowed so easily, though, and it doesn’t take her long to learn that Dernier doesn’t talk much, and when he’s not talking he’s looking, that Dum Dum never thought up a question he thought too rude to ask, that Jones has an unerring sense for when someone’s hedging around a question. None of them have said anything, but Bucky knows well enough what the occasional appraising glances she catches mean. 

++

They continue to trade off keeping watch in the evenings, using Jones’s watch to count the hours, even though the guards seem content to ignore them for at least a few hours each night. Their one meal a day comes in a dingy communal bowl at the end of the workday, and they sit cross-legged in a circle and pass it around, taking single bites until the bowl is empty. Bucky remembers one summer when she was around ten or so and, eager to get at least a couple of the girls out from under her feet, Ma had sent her and Rebecca down to the YWCA to be Girl Scouts three afternoons a week. They’d sat just like this, in a circle, but with their knees together and ankles to one side under their brown skirts. Rebecca had loved it, had taken to the songs and the handicrafts and the trips to Prospect Park to learn archery and marching and knot-tying. Bucky might have loved it, too, except Steve had been sick all that summer, and singing songs and winning badges was doing nothing but keep her from Steve’s bedside three days a week. 

Here, though, they don’t sing songs; they do tell stories. Mostly of home, now, getting closer and closer to the heart of what that means as the days tick by. There’s a lot they don’t talk about: the four regiment’s worth of men killed at Azzano, the slackening of their flesh under too little food. The morning rounds made by the guards, their boots a loud clang on the cement floor, when they stop at a cell at random and take one man. How those men never return. 

Today, eleven days in, supper is something like gruel, grey even in the yellow overhead lights, with chunks of fatty, unidentifiable meat; Bucky’s stomach has always been strong, and even though today she feels like she’s been kicked all over and her lungs wrung out for good measure, she is hungry. Taking a spoonful, which slides greasily down her throat, Bucky passes the bowl to Dernier and listens to the story Falsworth is telling about his two sisters. It ends with the three of them covered in pond weed and both girls pawning off the blame on him.

Bucky smiles, looking down at her feet. Her lips crack. “Sounds like my sisters, too,” she says. 

Jones smiles at her. “Yeah? How many you got?”

“Three. Rebecca, Susanna, Miriam.” She can see them, out in the narrow slot of a backyard, sun glinting off the shine of Rebecca’s hair, turning them all golden. The sun-drenched warmth feels foreign, now, like something from a dream, half-remembered and false. They might think she’s dead; they’ve probably gotten the telegram her family was never supposed to receive. 

“Vous êtes juif,” Dernier says, and Bucky narrows her eyes. She gets the gist, even if her French hasn’t improved much in the past couple of weeks.

“Yeah,” she says; Dernier drops his eyes first.

“Je ne savais pas,” he says, and then, “I am sorry.” He says something quick to Jones, who whistles in and makes an aborted move like he’s going to clasp Dernier on the shoulder. 

“He says he saw what the Germans did in his country, and that he —” he looks at Dernier, as if for confirmation, and continues — “that he tried, but he didn’t try hard enough.” Heat prickles Bucky’s eyes; she blinks rapidly, and nods around the hard knot in her throat. Her lungs hurt, have done for days, burning right down from her mouth, and the welling of emotion just sends pain down her chest. The cough that finally bursts from her shakes her whole body.

“Hey —” Morita’s hand is on her shoulder, on her back, the first gentle touch she’s felt in months, years it seems, and she fights against the desire to lean into it. 

Swallowing down the phlegm coughed up in her throat, she croaks, “I’m fine.” Across the circle from her, Jones looks far from convinced. Morita’s hand is still on her back, between her shoulder blades. She sits up, shakes it off. Her lungs rattle as she wheezes in a breath, the sound sending her mind skittering off to her past. “I’m fine,” she says again, as her skin runs hot and damp, as her hands tremble. Clenching them in her lap, she gives Jones the weak sort of grin that’s the only one they have in this place: tight-lipped and narrow. “Just the dust.”

That’s what they call it, the fine metal filings that settle in their skin, eyes, noses, that crack their membranes and choke their throats: dust. Just an irritation. At night, the coughing rattles the bars of their cages, reverberates through the wide spaces of the warehouse, an unsettling lullaby. She remembers the cough and the tremors Sarah Rogers had at the end, her sunken chest. In her head, in those long waking nights, Bucky sometimes recites the Kaddish, thinking of the narrow, neat hole in Lee’s head, of Stern knocked off his feet, of bodies that might have been — must have been — Oakley and Rentz and Garfield. It’s her mother’s voice, in her head, and the comfort that gives her is shadowed by the knowledge that she will likely never sit at her family’s table and hear Ma say their prayers again.

She only just remembers being chosen to ask the four questions at Passover, taking what seemed like hours to listen to her Ma repeat them until she remembered. With four daughters all close in age, it wasn’t her responsibility for very long; later, she taught Rebecca the questions, watching her face pursed in concentration in candlelight. She remembers, more, listening to Ma read the Haggadah, tell the story, her somber voice on the story of their peoples’ suffering. She could not imagine the pain, though she tried. It was a story of deliverance, but also of hard work. God only has our hands, Ma would say, so you’d best use them.

Dum Dum breaks the silence by launching into a story about his kids, and rush of fond gratitude rushes through Bucky. He has two, both boys, who live with his ex-wife and her family. They sound like little terrors, frankly, but it’s not as though Bucky would expect anything else from Dum Dum. 

++

They let her sleep the night through. When she realizes, blearily swaying to her feet at the morning bell, she glares at each of them, waiting for one to crack and look away. No one does, those mild-mannered lying sons-of-bitches. She’s distracted away from her annoyance at the way her head swims as takes a step, everything around her going cloudy for a long moment until she blinks rapidly and comes back to herself, one hand gripping the bars of their cell door and the other Dernier’s forearm. 

“Hey! Hey, buddy —” Dum Dum calls out, clearly to the guard who unlocked their cell and has already moved to the next. His head, a blank shell, turns to look at them. “Our buddy’s sick,” Dum Dum says, jovial and confident like this is an excellent idea. Bucky wants to grab him and shake him until he shuts up, but she finds she can’t unwrap her hand from its grip on the bars. 

The soldier turns, takes the three steps that bring him in front of their cell. “What did you say?” he says, accented and muffled by the shiny helmet. 

“He’s sick,” Dum Dum repeats, jerking his thumb at Bucky. “Maybe give him the day off for today.”

The guard turns his head toward Bucky; she can see the shadowy outline of her own head in the visor of his helmet. Drawing in her strength, she pulls herself up straighter, willing her hand to unclamp. Her limbs feel like molten metal, slow-moving and resistant to direction. She gets three fingers unwrapped from the bar when the guard lifts his baton and slams it down on her wrist, breaking her grip and sending her to her knees. 

She doesn’t cry out, she doesn’t think, but every breath she takes burns through her whole body, and standing back up takes a century. “He is fine,” the guard says, impassively. “You will all work two extra hours today.” He moves on. 

“I’m fine,” Bucky says feebly. Dum Dum looks like he’s ready to stomp on his beloved bowler, and Morita’s staring after the guard like he could take him apart, flay him down to his skeleton, with just his eyes. “Don’t do that again,” Bucky manages to say before a cough comes on.

“You think, Barnes?” Jones holds her arm as she doubles over, keeps holding it as they move out, supporting her through her feeble steps. She feels stronger as her muscles move, and as they get to the door of the factory floor, she drags her arm away from Jones and stands on her own. It’s only twelve hours she needs to make it through, now.

By at least the two hundredth flak cartridge she’s polished, Bucky feels like she might fall over right into the machinery. That would be one way of sabotaging it, she thinks a bit blearily, gum it up with her blood, bones, and what’s left of her flesh. Dernier works next to her, muttering things in French throughout the hours that she wouldn’t understand even if her head wasn’t barely attached. Her wrist no longer throbs; she cannot feel it at all. 

A cartridge comes down the conveyor; she roles it across the sander belt, then pushes it through the polisher, then another, the same, then another. After the first hour each day, the motions become habit, the body part of the machine. 

She fumbles; a cartridge falls to the floor before she notices it’s out of her hands. The clatter it makes is loud, even against the industrial din, and she’s shocked for one walleyed minute before realizing the cartridges are still coming, backing up on the conveyor. She grabs one, fumbles it through, pushes it along, then another, then suddenly they stop coming, the conveyor belt at a standstill. 

Confused, Bucky turns toward the mouth of the machine, only to feel a crushing pain shoot through her wrist as a guard — the same one as before, she thinks, though with their anonymous beetle helmets it’s hard to tell — smashes it with a baton. It’s only her grip on the edge of the conveyor that keeps her upright. Dernier hovers behind her shoulder, but doesn’t touch her. 

“Keep up,” the guard says, gruffly. He doesn’t say _or else_ , but they’ve all seen enough of their fellows disappear that Bucky knows she doesn’t want to face that option. 

“I got it, I got it,” Bucky says, hands lifted in a gesture of surrender. Telegraphing her movements, she slowly leans down and picks up the troublesome cartridge and turns back to the machine. Dernier gives her a quick look; she raises her eyebrows. Her wrist throbs, the insistent pounding overtaking the other pains of her body: her lungs, watery and suffocating, her stuffed-cotton head, her skin raw and stretched and cracking.

The guard turns the conveyor back on; it starts again. For the next hours, Bucky brings her mind down to the smallest movements of her hands, her arms: lift, roll, push, repeat. Her mind doesn’t drift; she cannot let it. Lift, roll, push, repeat.

When the machine clatters to a stop again, hours later, Bucky’s hands keep moving for one long moment before she realizes there are no more cartridges to shove along. Blinking, she looks around: next to her, Dernier stretches, pain crossing his face as he rolls his stiff shoulders, and the rest of the factory floor is empty but for her cellmates, paired up on nearby machines, which must mean they’ve made it through their extra hours.

A guard walks up. Bucky thinks she’s maybe beginning to recognize the sort of rolled-step gait he has, and she watches the hand nearest his baton. “You —” the guard says gruffly, gesturing to Dernier — “Finish cleaning up here. You, follow me.” 

She absolutely does not want to follow him anywhere. But one gloved hand twitches next to his baton, and strapped across his back is one of those hulking guns, so she keeps three steps between them and follows him across the factory floor and into a side supply room. Each of her cellmates watches her go, their gazes catching on hers, and she wonders if she’ll be the next unreturning man that they won’t talk about.

In the supply room, the guard gestures her to the far wall, against a pile of stacked crates, keeping himself between her and the single exit. Her hands clench, unclench; her wrist aches; her breath is rapid, ragged. He lifts his hands — Bucky braces, knees bent and ready to run — but he just lifts his hands to his helmet, twists it off. 

His eyes are bright, hard, his hair blond and darkened with sweat. His words and his mouth are cruel when he says, “You want off work duty tomorrow?” The way he’s leering at her, his hip-cocked stance, says the rest easily enough. She nearly laughs. 

Instead, she takes two steps forward, so she’s just out of arm’s reach, gives him a look up and down. Fact of it is, he’s not cottoned on, still thinks she’s a fella, otherwise he’d already have her shoved up against the crates. So: “Maybe,” she says, and eyes the jumping pulse in his bare throat, wills him to move forward.

He does: takes a step and lifts his hand, grabs her behind the neck, and without pausing she snaps her head forward and smashes against his nose. He staggers back, still gripping her neck, and she pummels at his stomach, ribs, anywhere she can reach. Wrenching her head down with his grasping hand, he spits out something in German, garbled with the blood that streams from his nose. Twisting, she drives one shoulder into his gut, grabbing for his baton. She’s too close to get her arm up to swing, but she smacks it hard against his knee while he tries to grab her arm. Even weakened, she has the advantage of not wearing bulky armor, and as soon as his grip slackens the smallest bit, she yanks away from him, fist and baton up and ready to brawl. 

The guard narrows his eyes, sets his shoulder to charge at her, takes a step and then fumbles, falls to his knees. Behind him, Dum Dum stands, holding a metal pipe, backed up by the rest of her cellmates. The guard wrenches around, grappling at Dum Dum, and Morita steps in at the same time as Bucky, landing a knee to his chin as Bucky brings the baton down on the join of his shoulder and neck. With a sickening snap, his head goes limp and he falls to the ground.

Bucky looks down; the soldier doesn’t move. She kicks him; he doesn’t move. She looks up at the rest of the guys, who curl around her in a huddle, breathing hard and steely-eyed. “Fuck you all,” she says. “I was managing.”

Jones is the first to laugh. He claps his hand over his mouth to muffle the sound, but his shoulders shake. 

“I mean it,” Bucky says, aware her voice is edging toward anger. “I can take care of myself.” 

At that, Morita gives her an unimpressed glare. “We’re not being fucking chivalrous, you fuck,” he says. 

“We’ve got your back,” Jones says, kinda gruffly, and through her annoyance she can tell that there’s a shred of fondness. 

Dum Dum takes his hat off, wipes his forehead with the back of the hand that’s still holding the pipe, and says to Morita, “Wait, what’s chivalry got to do with it?”

Morita blinks, stares at him, “Because —” he starts, then stops. Looks around to the rest of them. Bucky can feel her cheeks flush hot. No one else says anything, and Morita, a little miserably now, gestures to Bucky and says, “Because Barnes is —”

They all look at her. She is: breathing hard, sweating coldly, bleeding from her temple. She realizes, under their awkwardly avoiding gazes, all of them except Dum Dum’s held above her chin, that the guard had ripped the top buttons of her shirt off when she twisted away. A narrow stripe of her pale chest is exposed, little more than sternum, but it’s bare of hair as her cheeks; she doesn’t clutch at the fabric like a maiden caught out, but the temptation is there. She holds out her hands to her sides, instead, keeping her fists loose.

Dum Dum looks at her — at her, at her face. His eyes are wide. “Oh.”

“Yeah,” she says. They all shuffle, a little. 

“We don’t much care,” Jones says, finally, so she knows they’ve talked about it, which burns a little, but he’s not treated her any different, none of them have.

“Everyone has their reasons for being here,” Falsworth says, with a sort of diplomacy.

Bucky takes a breath, scrubs her hand over her forehead, laughs. “Fuck you all,” she says again, and that breaks the tense, crackling pressure in the room. She leans to peer out the door, see if there’s anyone coming. “What do we do with him now?”

Turns out Falsworth and Morita had been loading crates with finished cartridges, and there’s space in the last one. With the six of them, it’s quick enough work to carry the body over there after emptying out his pockets. Packing the space around his body tight with straw, they nail the lid down quick, with only a couple of jokes about what a nice surprise it will be for the Nazis who get to open it up. They, regretfully, have to leave behind his massive fucking ray-gun, shoving it behind some of the crates in the store room — Bucky does take a quick look at it, up close, to see how it works, and it’s sleek and smooth as anything she’s seen in a comic book — but he’s got two knives on him, and Dernier pockets one while handing the second over to Bucky. She slides in into her waistband, covered up by her shirt, so she can feel the sharp, tempered steel against her skin.

Before they head back, Jones offers to swap shirts with her, and turns his back while she strips hers off. Her undershirt is yellowed and ripped, and underneath it her flesh feels soft and slack over her ribcage. Her breasts are tender, nipples sore and chapped with the dry air and rough fabric. She scrambles into the new shirt quickly, buttons it up to the hollow of her neck. Jones looks rakish in hers, exposed throat and crooked grin. “Thanks,” she says, figuring that might cover a lot since they’re all aware that they’ve got to scramble to get back before another guard notices.

“Yeah,” says Jones. His eyes, for one moment, are soft; Bucky wipes her mouth and jerks her head toward the door. 

++

That night, she dreams of Steve’s skin bathed in the green mercury lamps, sickly, of her eyes fluttering open at Bucky’s touch. Of a sharp ray of blue light hitting Steve in her narrow, trembling chest and knocking her still. 

Bucky wakes up gasping, her breath heaving and wet. She claws at her chest: everything feels too tight, her lungs her skin her clothes. 

“Hey — hey!” Someone grabs her wrists — pain rockets up one arm — she strikes out, shoves them off, scrambles back. Hard bars against her back. “Hey,” the voice says again, softer, and when she looks this time, it’s Jones, hands held up in surrender. The whites of his eyes are bright, wide, in the dim light. 

“Sorry,” she breathes out. Around the cell, only Dum Dum is still sleeping, but as her gaze skitters across the others they mostly look away, except Jones, still kneeling in front of her, and Morita behind him. 

“Who’s Steve?” Jones says.

“What?”

“Steve. You were calling his name.” She hasn’t — she’s kept Steve to herself, sticking to talking about her sisters, her Ma, when they share stories. She doesn’t know why, not really: the rattling ache in her chest too telling, maybe, or just plain not wanting to bring Steve here, to this desolate, scrambling place in all its banal pain. 

“A friend,” she says. “My best friend.”

“Is he fighting?” Falsworth says. Bucky could laugh; does, a little, a raw little snort. Steve’s always goddamn fighting.

“Nah,” she says instead. “Steve’s always been sickly.” Dum Dum’s blinking awake now, listening too.

“Small mercies,” says Falsworth, like he knows what it means to feel that guilty relief. She nods. Now that she’s thinking about her, Steve fills up her mind: her deep laugh, the furrow between her brows when she sketches, the feeling of her narrow body tucked up next to Bucky on the train, her smile, her voice, her rasping breath. 

Bucky breathes in deep, shakes her head to clear it. “Steve’s an artist,” she says. “Could draw you anything. We used to talk about visiting Europe sometime, seeing all the big museums.” Jones snorts.

“Me too,” he says. “Me and my friend Will, we took an art history class together at Howard. Gothic and Renaissance architecture. We thought, Italy, all the little churches and shit, then Paris, Amiens, Chartes.” Dernier nods. “He’s an airman now, don’t know where.” 

“And we’re blowing that shit up,” Bucky says. The 107th had walked through towns in Italy leveled by bombs. Crumbling tawny brick older than any of them, chiseled stone and terracotta tiles and, once, a blown-open chapel, the only standing wall covered in a fresco of the Last Judgment. Christ’s hands held out, pointing souls up and down, his gaze heavy, his head encircled with a halo that glimmered gold even in the smoky air. To some of the fellas it had been a sign; she’d seen some of them cross themselves, take a moment on their knees. To Bucky it’s one more thing she’d tucked away to keep from Steve — all the destruction of all the things people built up for the future, art, lives, families, homes. 

Dernier wipes his hand across his mouth. He’s told them a little about his family, with Jones helping to translate some of it, so Bucky knows they’re all still in France, and working with the Resistance. A wife, a sister-in-law, two brothers, all of them living in the nebulous, terrifying uncertainty of Occupied France. Dernier’s only there because he was out on a mission, making contact with a cell in Austria, when he got caught. Falsworth drops one hand to Dernier’s shoulder, gives him a shared nod. 

They don’t sleep that night, none of them voicing the lingering expectation of a group of angry guards, of light-shooting guns and quick, agonizing deaths. Their quiet voices, their shared worries, work to stave off the anticipation.

++

The guards come in the morning, just like usual. Crouched on the floor, spine slotted between two bars so she’s very nearly comfortable, Bucky counts their steps. Each day, she listens for them to slow, to stop, and feels a hot guilty rush of relief when it’s not in front of their cell. Twenty, twenty-one, twenty-two, and Bucky wills them to keep going.

They stop. Inside the cell, they all shift. Bucky, Morita, and Dernier pull themselves to standing with the rest. Her pulse thumps in her neck; her throat is dry; her head is one dull ache. The cell door opens with a hideous creak, and three men with guns pointed at them surround the gap. One says something in German, and Bucky tracks his eyes as he looks them all over. Falsworth, Jones, Morita. Dum Dum. The leader stops, pivots, lowers his gun. He reaches for Dum Dum, who jerks his shoulder back, and Bucky knows what happens next.

“Hey, I wanna see what all the fuss is about,” Bucky says, shouldering forward. The guns swing to her; she blinks, grimly. The leader speaks enough English to give them rough commands, so she turns to him and says, “Take me.”

“Goddamn it.” Dum Dum grabs her elbow. 

“Barnes, you don’t gotta —” Jones starts, but Bucky glares at him. Dum Dum’s a charming asshole, sure, but he’s got kids. 

Dum Dum tries to pull her behind him, but she holds her ground. “I’m not letting them take a girl instead of me,” he hisses, undertone. 

She doesn’t jerk her elbow away, because he’s angry and scared, and so is she. “I’m not a girl,” she says back. “I’m a soldier, just like you.” She eases her elbow out of his hand and takes another step forward. The German leader cocks his head, observes her with amusement. 

“We don’t often have volunteers,” he says, his English clearer than she expected. “But as you are so enthusiastic —” He jerks his head, gesturing to the guy on his right, who approaches, gun still lifted, and grabs her arm with the other hand. 

The hush as she’s marched down the aisle between cells is familiar: relief, guilt. A few minutes after she’s gone off behind the doors, they’ll all be shuffled away, down to the factory floor, and whatever emotions they’re feeling now at the sight of Bucky gripped tight on each elbow by a German goon — Bucky and not them — will sift somewhere down into their guts to settle while their minds and bodies move to the endless tasks of hammering out missile casings and cranking machinery.

They go down a long hallway then outside through the warehouse doors, across the yard to a separate building, diagonal from the factory. It has windows, long expanses of shining glass that reflect the alpine sun, and a heavy, tall door. Bucky breathes: in, out, a still-rough rattle. One of the guards pounds on the door, and it creaks open. 

The man who opens it is short, balding, with round glasses and a crooked red bow tie. Bucky focuses on that, the absurdity of that tie, blood-red and just a bit askew, as the man smiles a feral grin and opens the door wider. “Let’s get started,” he says, and a tremble runs down Bucky’s spine.


	7. Chapter 7

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Half an hour later, Peggy tosses Steve a parachute pack and tugs her own on. Steve figures it out, watching her, and follows her toward the back of the plane. “You ever done this?” Peggy says, as Stark opens the hatch.
> 
> “Nope,” Steve says, and jumps out into the darkness.

_November 1943, Italian Front_

“I think that’s all the songs they know —” Onstage, Hodge flounders. The men in the audience had met his brash little speech about patriotism and sacrifice with chilling silence, then shouted taunts. Steve peeks from backstage, enough to see a clod of dirt explode against Hodge’s shield. “Fine,” Hodge growls into the microphone, stalking to the wings. 

“Get out there, save this,” Bennett says, urging the cluster of dancers hanging in the wings back onto stage. Bess, Marge, Aggie, Dolores, and Jean scramble back out for an encore of “Star Spangled Man” while said man tears the straps off his shield and thrusts it at Steve. 

“Didn’t you hear?” he snarls as he shoves past her, pushing the shield against her unyielding body. “They wanna see the _girls_.” He pulls off his cowl and throws it at Bennett, who flutters behind him nervously, making his way back to their makeshift dressing rooms. 

None of their shows have been like this. The half dozen they performed across the south of England were more subdued than those at home, sure, but fellas were plenty happy to see friendly faces — and legs. The men sitting out in the misting rain today are bleak, unresponsive but for some ill-natured jeers at the dancers. The gals are holding it down a little better, now, their bright, sunny voices breaking against the thin, reedy air, costumes a dull glimmer even in the rain. 

Still holding the shield, Steve makes her way behind the stage, too; with the drizzle they’ve cut some of the acrobatics for safety, so she doesn’t figure the men are clamoring for her presence on stage. It’s picked up a little, the rain, and her boots squelch in the mud as she makes her way between the stage and the tent set up as a dressing room. She’s feeling a little sorry for the gals’ silver heels when a voice comes from behind her.

“Well, you’re a sight, now, aren’t you, Private?”

Steve turns. Agent Carter’s grinning at her, curls starting to go limp in the rain, hands on her hips and looking as goddamn pretty as Steve remembers. 

She’s gaping a little, must be, but recovers enough to say, a little too shocked to be polite, “Agent Carter. Didn’t expect to see you here.” _Or ever_ , she doesn’t add. Colonel Phillips had never had any affection or purpose for Steve, she knew that, but it had stung to have both Agent Carter and Mr. Stark drop her like that, like they could change her whole life, her entire being, and waltz away without any skin from their noses. 

To her credit, Agent Carter does look a little shamed, glancing down and away quickly before nodding and saying, “Yes, I expect not.” She brings her eyes up, holds Steve’s gaze. “I suppose,” she adds, “you might call me Peggy. As you’re no longer reporting to me.” It’s a gesture of friendship, maybe an apology. Steve nods, and points toward the dressing tent. 

“I was about to change,” she says, leaving it open for Peggy to follow. She does.

Ducking inside the tent, Peggy wipes the damp away from her cheeks. “I quite like the uniform,” she says, a sly grin playing on her mouth, and Steve flushes up, looks away. She’s not so innocent that she can’t hear the suggestion in her words, and Steve’s made no promises, not with Dolores and certainly not with Bucky. And Peggy is — Peggy is stunning, even in loose trousers and a canvas jacket, hair frizzing from the rain. So Steve strikes a little pose, chin up and feet apart. The shield is still on her forearm, so she holds it up and tilts her head, gives Peggy her best press tour smile, and salutes. 

“Miss Victory USA, reporting for duty,” she says, then lets her shoulders go loose, sets the shield down. “Not that the fellas cared much, today.” She unzips the top of her spangled boiler suit, shrugs it off of her shoulders, tries not to think about Peggy’s eyes on the bare skin of her upper back, her skimpy camisole. 

“Well,” Peggy says, heaving a sigh. All the flirt’s gone out of her voice; when Steve turns, she’s dropped to one of the benches, elbows on her knees. “Not much room for joy, out here,” she says, and Steve is chastened, feeling a fool. “These boys more than most,” Peggy muses. “They lost most of their unit in battle last month, captured by the enemy. Those boys out there are all that’s left of the 107th.” 

The number hits Steve like a wave, knocks her asunder. “The 107th?” Peggy nods. “Who’s in charge?” She scrambles back into her suit, heading to the entrance of the tent even before Peggy can answer.

“Who do you think?” Peggy says, and doesn’t ask any questions, just leads her to the command tent, where Colonel Phillips blinks at her untidy entrance with his infuriating unflappable composure. 

“Private Rogers,” he says. “I did think I was finished with you.”

“The 107th,” Steve gasps. “Do you have a list of the captured soldiers?”

He sighs and waves his hands over the paper-strewn desk. “I don’t have time for this, Rogers.”

“I just need to know one name, sir. Private James Buchanan Barnes.” She can see the moment he recognizes the name, his gaze dropping. 

“I’ve written a lot of telegrams,” he says. “That name is familiar.” 

Steve’s lungs feel too tight. She doesn’t remember leaving the tent, but she blinks and she’s standing outside in the rain, her breath coming ragged, and Peggy’s at her elbow saying something. Shaking her head, Steve runs back to the dressing tent, scoops the contents of her shelf out, pulling on the jacket she’d bought in New York just before they left. It’s leather, the type airmen wear, and Dolores had grinned, flushed, and then laughed with delight the first time she wore it. 

“Steve, think about this.” Peggy’s followed her in, is standing with her arms crossed.

“Do you know where they were taken?” There were maps in the command tent; if she closes her eyes she can pull them up, but she doesn’t really know what the symbols mean. Peggy doesn’t answer. Steve pauses, fixes her with a glare.

“Austria, we think. We have intel on a weapons facility in the Alps.”

“Okay,” Steve says.

“What are you going to do, walk to Austria?” 

Steve grasps, mindlessly, for her clothes, shoving them into her pack. They’re paltry in the chill air of a Northern Italian winter, and will be worse than useless in the Alps, but she has nothing else. No uniform, anymore, except the sequin-spangled one she’s wearing. “If that’s what it takes,” she says, looking up at Peggy. 

“You don’t even —” Peggy puts a hand on Steve’s forearm; Steve shakes it off. “You don’t even know if Barnes is alive.”

“Yeah. That’s why I gotta go.” She buckles the front of the pack, slings it over her shoulder. On an impulse, she grabs Hodge’s shield, too, sliding her forearm into the straps. “If there’s even a chance —” she says, and Peggy nods her head, briskly. 

“I think I can spare you the walk,” she says.

++

Stark, to his credit, looks guilty when he sees Steve. She doesn’t really think he intended to drop her and Hodge like that, but the fact remains that she figured she’d never see him again. Her — whatever he is, her Frankenstein. After a faltering moment, he reaches his hand out of the hatch and helps Steve haul herself into the airplane. Peggy gets the same treatment, and he gestures to both of them to sit down and buckle up.

“My two favorite gals,” he says, bravado a little lost as he has to shout over the noise of the engine. “What’s your pleasure? Fondue in Lucerne? Romantic walk along the Seine? I know the best bar in Barcelona.” Peggy exchanges a glance with Steve that communicates exactly how many times she’s had to turn Stark down. 

“We’re charging a Hydra weapons facility in the Alps,” Peggy says mildly. Stark turns and looks at her, brow furrowed. “The one near Kreischberg,” she adds. 

“You’re not serious.” He glances between her and Steve, then shakes his head. “Well, I haven’t flown an unauthorized mission over enemy territory yet this week, so why not.”

“Get us as close as you can,” Peggy says. Stark frowns but nods.

“Sure thing, Pegs,” he says, with genuine affection. Steve fumbles with the strap of her pack, held between her knees, affixing the shield to its back. 

Half an hour later, Peggy tosses Steve a parachute pack and tugs her own on. Steve figures it out, watching her, and follows her toward the back of the plane. “You ever done this?” Peggy says, as Stark opens the hatch.

“Nope,” Steve says, and jumps out into the darkness.

++

They land in the forest, Steve’s parachute getting tangled up in branches as she tumbles down between the canopy of trees. She’s dangling from her straps, cursing a little as she twists to cut the lines, when Peggy walks up behind her. 

“You should have pulled the release when you hit the trees,” Peggy says, gesturing to the tab on Steve’s chest. Steve yanks it, and the parachute harness goes slack, dropping her to the ground. 

“Huh,” she says. Peggy shakes her head. Twilight is falling, and through the filter of pine the light is greenish and dull, but Steve can see a clear space between the trees ahead of them.

They find a road, and, after doing some haphazard calculations about where they must be, they choose a direction and set off. It’s not long before Steve hears the rumble of an engine coming up on their tail, though, and gestures Peggy off the road. It’s a surprise that Peggy hadn’t noticed it, first; there’s a hot, driving urge keeping Steve moving forward, but it’s Peggy’s calm council that’s actually gotten them there. 

They have a frantic, whispered conversation about what to do next: Peggy’s happy to shoot out the tires and then shoot whoever’s in the vehicle, but Steve figures if they can get themselves a working truck they should at least try. “Fine,” Peggy says, just as the truck rounds the corner. With a nod, they both run out just as the truck pulls even with them, Peggy going for the driver and Steve for the rear, and it’s quick, hardscrabble fight to knock out the two soldiers in the back. One of them she kicks, sending him tumbling ass over head out the back when the truck pulls sharply to one side, and the other falls still after she slams his head against the floor of the truck. 

She’s barely breathing hard, her heart thumping along steadily, as she looks down at the soldier between her legs, at her unblemished fists. The truck jerks again, throwing her off balance, then rights itself and accelerates. Just in time: she can hear the rumble of more trucks catching up to them. Making her way toward the front, Steve pulls up a corner of the canvas covering the space between the bed and the cab, and sees the back of Peggy’s head, curls unmussed, behind the wheel. She raps on the window, and Peggy tosses a wink over her shoulder, reaching back to open it up.

“What do you think of these uniforms?” Steve says. The Hydra soldiers are decked out like beetles, black gear and shiny helmets that cover their faces.

“Look terribly convenient to me,” Peggy says. “Wouldn’t be able to tell who’s under there at all.” She reaches to the soldier slumped over on the bench seat beside her, wrenches his helmet off. She takes off her own cap, folding it and tucking it into her jacket, and pulls it down over her face, steering with one hand. “Eugh, it smells awful in here,” she says. Laughing, Steve kneels to grab the helmet off the guy in the back, then shimmies through the window to get into the cab. As they go around a corner, she opens the door and shoves the driver out, and as she’s slamming it shut she hears Peggy’s sharp inhale.

In front of them is a razor-wire topped fence, protected by searchlights and a guard tower. The gate’s already opening as they approach, though, and Peggy drives through calm as you please and follows the rutted pathway toward a warehouse, deftly backing the truck up into a loading bay. Steve’s heart should be pounding out of her chest from the nerves of it all, but it beats slow and steady. 

“Here we go,” Peggy says to Steve, voice muffled by the helmet, and they jerk their doors open at once.

Creeping along the side of the truck, Steve looks around. The building they’re butted up against stands in front of another, without windows, and far beyond them a wall towers up overhead, its vast expanse sending her mind, strangely, off to pictures of the construction of the Hoover Dam in the newspapers, looming direly like it might explode with a rush of water at any minute. 

When she reaches the back of the truck, Peggy’s there already, standing over a guard prone on the ground. Steve gestures toward the loading bay door, and they haul themselves up and creep in. Steve pulls her helmet off, eyes adjusting to the light quickly. The cavernous space looks like a factory floor, but not like any of the ones Steve’s seen: the machines shine, blue light glinting off them from all directions. Beside her, Peggy drops her helmet, eyes wide. “I need to find Bucky,” Steve whispers, and Peggy nods. 

“Split up?” she says. Steve nods, thinks about clasping her hands, about pulling her close and kissing her, about saying goodbye, and doesn’t do any of those things. Peggy waits until a guard walks past then darts across the aisle, ducking behind a towering machine, gun held at the ready. Wrenching her eyes away, Steve moves slowly down the side of the factory floor. 

Dodging the soldiers who move back and forth through the rows of machines, Steve finds the rear door and cracks it open onto a muddy yard, with more soldiers across the way, in front of the long, windowless building she noticed earlier. Down one side of the factory wall, a guard walks away from her. She slips out the door, creeping along the wall in the dim light until she reaches the guard and knocks him flat with a punch to the small of his back. She grabs him before he falls, lowering him to the ground quietly, then waits for the searchlights that bounce erratically across the yard to sweep to one side.

Swinging the shield down off her back and holding it in front of her, she runs headlong toward the side door of the windowless building and the pair of guards in front of it. She’s close before they get their wits together and start shooting, and she takes out one with the shield, flinging it indiscriminately to collide with his head, and the other with a kick to the groin and an elbow to the nape of the neck, just where a sliver of skin shows beneath his helmet as he crumples forward. She pulls a handgun off one of them and tucks it into her pocket.

The door is locked, but a hard wrench of her fist around the handle breaks the internal mechanism. She stares at the broken-off handle in her palm for a stunned moment before tossing it aside. A crack of faint green light spills out, and as she drags the door open the first thing to hit her is the overwhelming stench, like stagnant, humid summer air in the tenements, but worse. Once she’s inside, it’s immediately obvious why, for spread across the floor of the warehouse, as far as she can see, are bars holding back soldiers, men who stare at the opening door with a wary tension. 

They’re cells, she realizes as she steps closer, cages really, and each has a door with a set-in lock. The soldiers nearest her have jumped to their feet, gaping a little, and the movement catches the attention of another guard, who steps down the hallway toward the door. Keeping to the shadows, Steve approaches him from the side and, in one breath, strikes with the shield and then her fist, a one-two that knocks him over, stumbling into the bars of one of the cells then slumping to the ground. She fumbles at his waist and comes up with a set of keys. 

Getting the cage unlocked is easy enough, but when she swings the door open, all five inhabitants stare at her for a long beat, before one fella says, “Who the fuck are you?”

“Um,” Steve says, fumbling as she steps to the next cell. She lifts the shield, like a talisman, and says, “Miss Victory USA. You’re welcome.” The men in the cell exchange a glance, but Steve moves on and opens the next lock, then the next, then passes the key ring off to a soldier to go down the row. 

“I’m looking for someone,” she says. She’s been searching all the faces she can see, hoping. “Sergeant Barnes? James Buchanan Barnes.” She uses the name on Bucky’s enlistment forms, hoping there’s been no reason for them to know her otherwise. 

The men from the first cell glance at one another. “Barnes was taken two days ago to the isolation ward,” says one of them, with a red beret and a British accent. He points down the hallway. “Nobody comes back once they leave,” he warns. 

Steve’s stomach falls, a hard clenching fear taking hold of her gut. She looks around; there’s a hundred men at least, all watching her with some bewilderment. “The tree line is northwest, past the gate. Give ‘em hell. I’ll meet you there with whoever else I find. Oh, and if you meet a woman called Peggy, she’s with me.” 

She starts off through the crowd, just as one of the fellas says to her, “You know what you’re doing, sweetheart?” 

Half-turning on her heel, Steve shakes her head and calls back, “Not a fucking clue,” before taking off down the corridor.

It’s empty; her footsteps echo off the long brick walls, and the air she breathes in has the musty damp of a cellar. The corridor seems endless, not labyrinthine but just a long, blank expanse, right angles and no doors. As she rounds a corner, she sees a man running away, clutching a briefcase to his chest. He glances back at her for the barest second, but when she doesn’t pursue him, he disappears down the intersecting corridor. 

He’s come out of the only door she’s seen, an opening out of which spills more of that strange blue light. She glances both ways as she enters, but the space beyond is empty. Or — 

It’s just numbers, mumbled and meaningless, but that’s Bucky’s voice she hears; she would know it even at the very ends of the earth. Shoving through another doorway, she sees the dark top of Bucky’s head first, her pale skin, her moving mouth, where she’s strapped down to a table, eyes staring blankly above her.

“Bucky,” Steve breathes out. Beneath her hands, the restraints stretch and tear; she rips one open, then the next, and all the while Bucky breathes shallowly and murmurs her name, her enlisted name. “Bucky,” she says again, cupping her cheek with one hand. Her skin is clammy and cold, and her eyes drag slowly to Steve’s face at the touch, hazy and unfocused. A blood vessel has burst in one of them, a red stain spreading across the white, and her pupils are cavernous and black, too big even in the dim light. 

“Steve,” she says, finally, a barely-breathed whisper.

“Yeah, Bucky, yeah,” Steve babbles, pressing her thumbs into Bucky’s cheekbones, grounding herself.

“God, you’re beautiful,” Bucky says, eyes going glassy and slipping away again.

Steve grasps her shoulder, shoves her up to sitting. “No, Bucky, no, you’ve gotta stay with me, we’ve gotta go.” Bucky’s weight against her shoulder is too slight, a slack, boneless slouch. 

Bucky’s eyes slide over to Steve again, less hazy this time. “Steve,” she says, startled. “You’re here.”

“Yeah, I am, but we’ve gotta leave.” She helps Bucky swing her feet off the table and stand. She wavers, clutching at Steve’s arm, looks up at her like she’s seeing her for the first time. “I thought you were dead,” Steve blurts out, one hand on the wildly pulsing vein at Bucky’s throat — alive, alive. 

Bucky’s mouth gapes. “I thought you were _smaller_ ,” she says, and Steve swallows down her laugh, holds onto her arm and starts to move them toward the door.

“I joined the Army,” she says, glancing down the hallway before maneuvering them both out the door. 

Bucky doesn’t stop, but she does say, “What the _fuck_ , Steve,” right into Steve’s ear, which is perhaps a gentler response than Steve expected, when she imagined telling Bucky the whole story of her new body. 

“Hey, you don’t have a monopoly on stupid ideas,” Steve says, just as an explosion blows out half the wall in front of them. Staggering back, Steve half-turns, clutching Bucky close to her and shielding her from the blast. It settles, and they’re both still breathing, but the rubble blocks off the corridor in front of them. Steve peeks cautiously through the hole, seeing a metal gangway lit up from below by flames. She looks at Bucky, who shrugs, and starts climbing through the hole.

She can’t see a way out, and below them another explosion rocks the floor. Bucky stumbles against her, grasping her hand. The heat licks up against them; sweat pours down Steve’s spine, leaves her hand slick against Bucky’s, but she holds tight to it anyway, leading her up a stairwell. From up higher, she can see another corridor across the way, so she leads them toward the gangway that crosses the raging fire below. Before they can get across, though, their way is blocked by a man in a long black coat with the crimson octopus symbol she’s been seeing across the factory emblazoned on one shoulder — an officer, it looks like, or someone who thinks himself important. Behind him stands the little, scrambling fellow Steve had seen in the corridor.

“Ah,” the officer says, “I wondered if I’d ever meet you. Erskine’s little toy.” 

Steve straightens her shoulders, swinging the shield down from her back. The mention of Erskine’s name sends a hot pulse of anger through her gut. “I don’t think we’ve been introduced,” she says, taking a step forward as the officer swaggers toward her, eyes raking over her body. Behind her, she can hear Bucky’s ragged breath. Steve’s footsteps clang as she steps onto the gangway. 

“How remiss of me. Johann Schmidt. Your predecessor, one could say, crudely.” He lifts one eyebrow sardonically, like she’s meant to know what that means. “I must say, you’re not very impressive,” he adds, stepping close enough that Steve can haul back and deck him with a right hook.

“I’ve heard that before,” Steve says, as Schmidt stumbles back. When he straightens, there’s a crazed look to his gaze, red around his eyes. He propels toward her and lifts a fist; she ducks behind the shield, and the impact leaves a fist-shaped dent in the metal and a jarring sensation down her arm. She reaches for her stolen gun, but he knocks her off balance first, sending the gun skittering off the edge of the gangway and Steve tumbling backwards. But she’s been practicing being knocked over, playing at back flips and mule kicks to the amusement of her friends on the steamship across the Atlantic, and it’s nothing more than muscle memory to kick out as she falls, knocking Schmidt back a few feet across the gangway.

Then, the other man pulls a lever, and the gangway separates, leaving a gulfing gap between them, and Schmidt pulls himself up and then — Steve stares, blinks, watches as he peels away his face to reveal the lurid red beneath. Her stomach lurches.

“Yours doesn’t do that, does it,” Bucky mutters from behind her, her voice shaken. 

“Uh,” Steve says in response, because Erskine had mentioned, just once, a previous failure, and she thinks she’s staring it in its terrifying red eyes right now. 

“So you see, little girl, that I am Erskine’s first and greatest achievement,” he says, laughing, and Steve wonders if Erskine had known about this particular alteration before he picked Steve for the chamber. This terror, this madness. “And this is all the Americans can come up with to try to beat me? I am the future of humanity. And you, you’re nothing special at all,” he spits. 

“You’re right,” Steve says. “I’m not special. I’m just a girl from Brooklyn.” He smirks, already turning to leave, but Steve knows this won’t be the last time they meet. 

“You will die, girl from Brooklyn,” Schmidt says. “The future of the human race is better than you.” He and the other man run out as another explosion rocks the ground beneath their feet. 

They have to get to that corridor; the building is collapsing around them. Searching up and down the gangway, Steve finds a girder still intact and helps Bucky over the rail. “One at a time,” she says, because even under Bucky’s weight the metal creaks. Holding her arms out, Bucky carefully places her feet one in front of the other, making it halfway across when another explosion rocks the floor and splinters a crack along the far end of the girder. Bucky pauses for the span of a breath — Steve’s heart thuds — and then takes a running leap, catching herself on the far railing just as the girder breaks and falls away from her feet.

She scrambles over the railing, leans against it, looks back at Steve with pure fear. Between them yawns a gap of a dozen yards at least, with flames licking higher as the moments pass. Behind Bucky is the corridor to the outside, to freedom. 

“Just go,” Steve screams across the gulf. “Get out of here!” She has to leave, has to — Bucky needs to survive. Steve made a promise, made a thousand promises; Steve never expected to outlive her.

“No!” Bucky yells back, slamming her hand against the railing. “Not without you!” Her voice cracks; tears well in Steve’s throat. She looks across the space between them and starts to back up.

When she jumps, it’s like every cell in her body reaches for Bucky, like her guts are yanking her forward, and when she hits the rails and grips tight, Bucky’s hands find hers and hold on.

++

Bucky watches her like she’s seeing a ghost most of the walk back to camp. Steve doesn’t really know what to say, other than to ask after her injuries, check in occasionally. She answers laconically. Steve walks next to Bucky as much as she can, shoves her shoulder up under Bucky’s arm to support her when she flags — though Bucky only tolerates her help for short periods before shrugging her off — but there are one hundred and sixty-three men on this march, and Steve will not let any of them fall behind. She makes circuits of the whole line every few hours, giving a critical eye to all the walking wounded, shifting men onto one of the trucks as needed. They’ve liberated two tanks, four open-back trucks, a water truck, countless of the strange blue-rayed guns, and thank god, a supply truck still crammed full of boxes of oats, a couple of crates of dried sausages, two barrels of dark ale, even some tin cups and such. What took an hour and a half by airplane will take them three hard days of walking, and Steve knows they might not have been able to push through without food. 

They march through the night after the escape, eager to get as far from the factory as possible. When morning breaks, Steve calls for a respite to rest and take inventory, so she knows that the supplies they’re most severely lacking are anything medical. The men had been stripped of their equipment, so beyond the kit Peggy carries with her, they have a handful of pill and powder packets that had made it through the imprisonment shoved in pockets here and there. Amongst them, they have one medic, a fella from the 92nd, who looks bleakly at their single, incomplete kit and starts triaging those who are in the most need. 

Most of the men are malnourished and bone-sore, but don’t have any serious physical injuries that a good, long leave and some real rations won’t fix. There’s a nasty strain of pneumonia running through the group, though, and about twenty guys have coughs that rattle through the thin mountain air, making Steve’s lungs twinge with phantom aches. Still a few more have injuries lingering from battle, ill-healed and, in some cases, tender and red with infection. Nearly all of them have the runs. 

She didn’t know it would be like this: a horde of men with dark-bruised eyes and skittering breath, clutching too hard to their stolen guns. Bucky holds one like it’s an extension of her, cradled in the crook of one arm, the other hand gripping hard to the barrel. The body of it is dark, like the bruising across Bucky’s jaw, like the grit worn into her nail beds, like the shadows that live in the creases under her eyes. Steve watches her, and watches her; even when she’s circling around through the bedraggled ranks of marching men, her eyes fall back to Bucky. The back of Bucky’s neck is scabby and red. Bucky stares forward and doesn’t look for Steve.

They only rest for a few hours, that first day, then shuffle the sickest onto the trucks and fall back in. When Steve finds Bucky again, she’s been joined by the little group of men who had been in that first cell — Steve recognizes them right away, and if she hadn’t, the Ranger’s happy cry of “Miss Victory USA!” and the Brit’s deep, chivalrous bow would give them away. Bucky had seemed pleased to see them when they’d shown up dragging along a small fleet of tanks and trucks; Steve realizes later that she’d been too distracted by the prospect of more supplies to introduce herself.

They seem surprised when they learn that she’s Bucky’s friend, and Steve wonders, with a guilty rush, what she was to Bucky, with all that distance between them, what kind of story she became. She’s careful with her words, though, not sure who they are to Bucky and what they know, but when she walks away to make another loop, one of the guys — Jones — slaps Bucky on the shoulder and Bucky gives him a careful, sweet little grin that makes Steve’s stomach clench up.

Bucky’s still with the group when they stop for the night, finding a clearing off the road with ground that’s mostly dry. It’ll be a cold, unprotected night, but the weakest need some sleep before they can keep going. A couple of men are already rigging up a fire and a barrel to cook up some oatmeal, and Steve sets another one on tapping one of the kegs of ale and rationing it out. A little heartiness won’t go amiss. 

As people settle in and start to eat, Steve makes her way over to Bucky. She sees Peggy across the way, deep in conversation with their medic, hair scraped back from her face and cheeks flushed red with the walk. Peggy’s been making her rounds, too, but hers seem to have more to do with asking them about their experiences and gathering as much information as she can. 

Bucky’s got beer and a tin bowl of oatmeal, as do the rest of the guys, so Steve sits down next to her, the half-rotted log she’s using as a bench creaking a little as she settles. Bucky blinks at her. “That didn’t happen before,” she says in a low tone. Steve lifts an eyebrow. “I just mean —” Bucky looks forward, takes a sip of her beer. “It’s gonna take some getting used to the fact that a quick breeze won’t knock you down anymore.” The words sound like they take effort, forcefully light. Steve licks her lips. They need to have this conversation, they do, but she can’t, not with these men sitting around them looking down at their bowls, with one hundred and sixty-three souls to shepherd back, with a whole painful year’s worth of thoughts to tell. Bucky is a scant few inches from Steve, and yet her very molecules ache for the brush of their shoulders together, for the familiar press of Bucky’s arm against hers, and she no longer knows if that reach, that ache, that yearning is something new, discovered with the remade cells of her body, or has been there all along. It doesn’t seem fair to tell her that, now, with days of walking ahead and all the air around them shared.

Instead, she says: “I don’t know, some of those winds on the Atlantic tried their damnedest.” Bucky lifts one eyebrow.

“All they did was make me seasick,” she admits, as if Steve doesn’t know that she hates the ocean. She thought about that, on the steamship to London, of Bucky in a ship full of troops, muscling it out as the waves roiled them this way and that. 

“Not me,” she admits, and points to her ear. “Fixed up my hearing and my vertigo all in one.” She’d written to Bucky saying so, sitting up on the top deck on a day with some sun, thinking how the water crossing below her might have also carried Bucky. She’d sent it when they landed in England, but she supposes it didn’t get to Bucky in time. 

“Huh,” is all Bucky responds, and eats. 

Night falls, crimson-streaked sky fading to violet and indigo, and Steve makes one last pass around the camp as everyone starts to bunk down. She’s set rotating patrol duty to a few of the heartier men and herself. She doesn’t need much sleep these days, but the men here do, desperately. When she returns to Bucky, she’s curled with her back to the rest of the guys, who form a tight circle, all of them settling in to sleep except Dugan, who will take one of the first patrol shifts. 

She kneels down next to Bucky; Bucky hitches up on one elbow. In the last flickering light of the fire, the bruise across Bucky’s jaw is brilliant purple, and her eyes are sunken and dark, looking at Steve like she’s not real. Steve wants to curl up next to her, to fold her in her arms, to let their heat melt together, an inverse of all the times Bucky pulled her close when she was sick. She wants to touch her cheeks like she did when she found her spread on that table, to show herself that Bucky’s real and alive, wants to kiss her. 

Instead, she squeezes her upper arm, says, “Get some sleep, yeah?” She doesn’t hear Bucky settle back down until she’s started walking away.

++

The weather holds the next day, and they make good time. When they stop for the night and take a look at Peggy’s maps, the two of them figure that they should get back to camp tomorrow, barring any unforeseen troubles.

Once they’ve got fires going, spirits seem to lift, heavy, haggard sighs replaced with groans of relief across the camp. Steve meanders through, doing her usual counts: how many keep coughing, how many are still ambulatory. Whose infections still flare up and whose fevers have broken. The men group around fires in huddles of eight or ten, alliances forged in the long weeks of imprisonment. 

Steve sees Bucky lower herself to the ground next to one of the fires, her motley group of cellmates with her. They all know Steve now; it’d be perfectly natural for her to walk over and sit next to Bucky. She heads that direction, but then catches sight of Peggy, sitting a little ways off, head bent improbably over a sheaf of papers.

“Find anything interesting?” Steve asks as she drops to the ground next to Peggy. It’s mossy, damp, but at least it’s not the muck of the road. 

“Might have,” Peggy says noncommittally, folding her forearms over the stack of papers. She’d spent much of the day’s march in deep conversation with Morita, Bucky’s Ranger friend, who’d produced a clutch of repurposed papers with intricate little drawings covering their text, much to Peggy’s delight. 

Her face, wiped bare of makeup, is wan, the placid expression she’s putting on not quite warming her cheeks. She must notice something pass over Steve’s face, annoyance at being kept ignorant, because she adds, “I’ll tell you as much as I can once I’ve read more.”

Steve sighs, pushing her loosened hair back away from her face. _As much as I can_ won’t be much, of course, because Peggy is an international agent and Steve is — Steve is the entertainment. She looks at her hands: there’s blood crusted in her knuckles, mud ground into the crevices of her fingernails. Not enough to be a soldier, though.

“Hey,” Peggy says, bumping their shoulders together. “You found Bucky.” There’s pride in her voice; Steve can feel the corners of her mouth tip up.

“Yeah,” she says. “Yeah, I did.” Yards away, Bucky’s rubbing her hands together and holding them toward the fire, tipping her head toward Dugan to hear something he’s saying.

“I can see why you’re friends,” Peggy continues. “Bucky’s — very interesting.” Steve looks at her, sharply. Peggy blinks.

“You —” Steve starts, uncertain how to finish. She doesn’t get a chance to think of anything, because across from them, Dugan’s rising to his feet then making his way over to them. He stops in front of Steve and Peggy; they both look up.

“Ladies,” he starts, then, catching the way Peggy’s shoulders draw back, hastily corrects himself. “I mean, ma’ams. Um. Sirs?”

“Agent Carter will do just fine,” Peggy says, a bit chilly. “And Private Rogers.” Which of course means that Dugan has no reason to show deference to Steve other than chivalry, but he still ducks his chin in apology at them both.

“Agent Carter, ma’am. Private Rogers. I don’t much know what swing you have once we get back to camp, but seeing as you’re the ones they sent for us they must have some reason to listen to you, I figure.”

Steve opens her mouth to say something stupid like _nobody sent us_ or _once we get back they’ll probably arrest us and send our asses back home_ , but is saved by Peggy’s unruffled, “We’ll see once we return, I suppose.”

“Well,” Dugan says, more confident in his mission. “The 107th is — well, you can see. Half of us should probably be sent home to heal and the other half’s not enough to make up a full regiment. And we’re better off than some of the other units here. What I’m saying is, it’ll be logical for the brass to send us off to new units that need men.” He clears his throat. The narrow brim of his hat casts a shadow across his forehead in the fading light; Steve wishes she could see his eyes. “I’d just like to ask, if you could put in a word — to maybe keep some of us together.” He gestures to the cellmate group. Bucky’s back is to Steve, but Jones and Dernier keep slipping glances their way. “I know it’s not — strictly regulation. We make a decent enough team, is all,” Dugan finishes.

“Not a bad idea,” Peggy says. “Suppose we’ll see.” She shrugs a little, not promising anything, but his stance relaxes in relief before he sharpens back up to give Peggy a salute and returns to the group.

Steve watches as he sits back down and says something. Bucky nods her head in response, then ducks her chin sideways, throwing a glance back at Steve and then away. Bucky wants to stay, Steve realizes. Of course she does; she’s done enough to get herself here that a little thing like entitled leave after being tortured as a prisoner of war won’t stop her. Bucky wants to stay, and Steve is going to be sent home: best case without a job, worst with a treason conviction and a stay in military jail to look forward to.

“If you were in charge,” Steve says to Peggy, “what would you do with me?”

Peggy leans back on the heel of one palm and looks at Steve. Regards her. “I haven’t quite decided,” she says, finally. “But I’d put you to use.” There’s only measured thoughtfulness in Peggy’s voice, but Steve feels her blood warm under Peggy’s gaze anyway. 

She ducks her head. “That’s all I want,” she says, aware that it sounds a little striving, desperate. She stretches her hands, palms on her knees. Her knuckles are dirty, but unbroken. Looking down at them, she remembers the dull glint of a door handle, torn off and sitting in her palm, and the curve of Hodge’s shield tucked against her forearm. Her muscles feel well-worked and warm in a way she’s maybe never felt before. Pushed a little, but comfortably. Sure, she feels anger well up in her at the thought of what these men have been put through, at the knowledge of the Nazis pushing their way cruelly across Europe, but that’s not the only reason she wants to cling, hard, to any chance she’s given to stay here. It’s not Bucky, either, or not precisely; if Bucky were sensible and would take her leave, head on home for a little, Steve would still want to stay. The fact that Bucky won’t just drives the desire a little more.

What she can’t say, not to Peggy, even though she was there at her making and before, and maybe not to Bucky, who still looks past her a little, like the smaller, more frail Steve might be hiding behind her shoulder, is that her body fits here, her new body. Fits in the fearless jump from the belly of an airplane, in the mule-kick that knocked a man clean out of the back of a truck, in the great running leap across a flaming chasm. She can’t say, because she knows this is what Erskine remade her body for, what her cells ache to do, and the knowledge of what she’s chosen unsettles her far more than it consoles. Her body is for war, and the war is here.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sorry for the delay on this, but I was traveling and am still getting caught up! But: REUNION! \o/


	8. Chapter 8

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> “Did it hurt?” Bucky says, into the silence. She’s been thinking it since her mind started to clear, wasn’t sure she could bear the answer. But if it did, it doesn’t seem to now; Steve moves with an ease she never had before. It’s not the real question, but she doesn’t need to ask that one. Bucky figures she knows why Steve up and did — whatever it was that got her remade this way. Bucky’s the one who taught her to fight with her fists, after all, no sense in being surprised that Steve doesn’t know any other way to go about it.

The forest has the deep, dark stillness of the worst fairy tales, of waiting horrors that don’t announce their presence. It’s not plagues of blood and locusts Bucky fears, nor violent wolves and monsters. The stomping feet of a couple hundred men don’t really dispel Bucky’s unease. She knows about monsters, now, and doesn’t need to look over her shoulder to know that Schmidt and Zola will stalk them, watch and wait and make a move when her attention is turned away. 

She knows because she’s alive, and Zola must hate her for being alive and out of his grasp, and want her all the more. It might be sheer dumb luck of timing, but she’s the only one who survived this long — all those men taken away to solitary, one by one, every day, and never returning. She thinks it was a couple of days, at least, before Steve found her.

Steve. Bucky keeps seeing the glint of Steve’s golden hair in the corner of her eye, each time she looks over at Bucky. Each glance tells Bucky it’s really her; for all that she’s now Bucky’s height, and broader than her in the shoulders, she still has that stubborn, determined set to her eyes, snappish and flinty. Under her gaze, Bucky keeps her shoulders up and firm, ignores the pain that rolls down her spine with each step, the bruises that envelop her ribcage. 

The trees are old, heavy, thick, with roots that rumble up from the soil in gnarled knots, and the night is dark with only the barest sliver of moon overhead. Her feet trip up, made clumsy and leaden from her long hours — days — of restraint. When Steve’s hand lands on her elbow, catching her just before she trips to her knees, her gut twists up hard. 

“I’m okay,” she says, leveraging her elbow out of Steve’s grasping hands, too strong, too hard. Underneath that grip, Bucky’s joint feels gritted up, stiff, bones rasping with each movement. Steve keeps looking at her; she straightens her back. “There are lots of fellas worse off,” she says. Underneath the raw hoarseness of her voice, she thinks _three two five five seven zero three eight Sergeant James Buchanan Barnes_. Other guys _are_ worse off than she is: wits ground down into dust by the repetitive horrors, by the memories of men no longer at their sides. At least Bucky still remembers who she is, who she’s supposed to be.

“I can stay with you,” Steve says, as they keep trudging forward. Bucky doesn’t know the fellas around her, not by more than sight, but the group stretches far back behind them, men with grim faces and stolen guns. The thing in Bucky’s arms is too big, bulkier than her old, comfortable Springfield, but she still grips hard to the barrel, unwilling to swing it around to her back yet. 

“You don’t gotta,” Bucky says. Steve looks at her, again; she can feel it even though she’s watching her feet. 

“Be careful,” Steve says, and Bucky wants to laugh, but doesn’t. Steve steps away, loops around toward the back of the group, and Bucky keeps walking. One step, two. _Three two five five seven_ — 

++

As sunlight filters through the heavy tree cover, the men start blinking, looking around them, finding each other. Bucky had seen enough of the aftermath, in her dash with Steve out of the exploding factory, to know that the escape had been hardscrabble and bloody, and she feels each pleased, happy greeting in the hollow of her gut. She hasn’t seen any of her cellmates yet.

Sometime after daybreak, they reach a road. It’s empty, deep grooves cut into the packed dirt evidence of the heavy trucks that rumbled into and out of the factory gates daily, taking shipments of all the deadly things Bucky and the rest of the men manufactured. Up at the front of the group, Steve consults with another woman, who holds a map, and Bucky wants to laugh. Neither wears an Army uniform; in the light, Bucky gets a better look at the leather jacket Steve wears, ripped and singed from their near-escape, and at the neck underneath its lapels there’s a metallic glint, matched by stripes down her legs. They’re out of place, too shiny and delicate, and Bucky’s brain scrambles to know why they look familiar before she realizes they’re goddamn sequins, like that fucking corset Angela wore that left Bucky covered in spangles. The woman with her wears dun trousers and a green jacket, nipped in snug at her narrow waist, and has shoved back a disheveled pile of brushed-out curls behind her ears. 

There’s nothing official about this rescue. Steve might be their Moses, sent down to bring them from tribulation, but she’s certainly not been sent by any U.S. Army officer. Steve works for the U.S.O.; she’d said as much in her letters. And even if she’s now — even if she can rip apart leather strapping and jump yards across a flaming chasm and hold Bucky up like she’s nothing, like the heavy weight of her exhausted body is feather-light — Steve is still just one woman, running on stubbornness. Bucky could kill her.

She tromps her way up to the front. In the pause, some of the men squat on their haunches in the ditch, catching their breath. 

Ambling up behind the pair, Bucky ducks her head between their huddled shoulders, looking at the map. “You lost, Rogers?” 

Steve turns her head, lifts one eyebrow so slowly that it drips all the dry sarcasm she doesn’t speak, and it’s so familiar that Bucky feels it like a punch to the diaphragm, winding and harsh. That’s her friend, under all of that, her closest friend who’s out here in hell, out here because of _Bucky_ , and it’s so damned unfair that Bucky thinks, for one too-long moment, that she might be back on the table, that he’s figured out a way into her mind with his needles and his electroshocks, and she’s torturing herself from the inside. Steve, here, healthy and strong: Steve, here, in danger. 

“Hey — hey, you alright?” Something must show on her face, and she can’t — can’t let _him_ see — can’t let Steve worry. She grins, maybe a shade too brightly, at Steve, in front of her — alive — real, she thinks. 

“Peachy,” she says. 

Steve looks at her a beat too long. Steve’s jawline is fuller, Bucky thinks, and she can tell because it’s suddenly at nearly eye level. She still has a mole on one side, and a bump in her nose where it’s been hit a couple times too many. Her eyes are still blue. The woman next to them starts to fold the map up.

“Oh! Um, Bucky, this is Peggy — Agent Carter. Peggy, this is Bucky.”

“I thought it must be,” Agent Carter says, holding out one hand. She’s British, and she’s beautiful, and Steve’s eyes are bouncing between them like she doesn’t know which one to look at. 

“My absolute pleasure,” Bucky says, smiling as they shake hands. Carter’s mouth purses a little, as though she’s holding back a laugh. Crimson lipstick creases in the corners of her lips. Bucky thinks she might be in love. 

“Bucky,” Carter says, like she’s rolling it around in her mouth. Her gaze on Bucky is sharp, knowing; Bucky wonders what Steve’s told her. They didn’t have a plan, before she left, and Steve has made her no promises. 

“Sergeant James Buchanan Barnes. Ma’am.” She doesn’t think _three two five five_ as Carter releases her hand, doesn’t worry at the raw skin at her wrists.

“I’m very pleased you’re alive, Sergeant Barnes,” Carter says, with a glance to Steve, who rubs the back of her neck, looking at the ground. 

“The feeling’s mutual,” Bucky says, still looking at Steve, at the bashful curl of her too-big shoulders. She can’t quite parse it, isn’t sure she wants to, so instead she says, “We have a plan?”

“I think —” Steve says, and then stops. She cocks her head, body gone tense and still, and then Bucky feels it, too. A tremble in the ground.

“We have to get back,” she says. The rumble is unmistakable; she has heard it on battlefields across two continents. 

Steve nods, turns around. “Get back!” she urges the men in the ditch. “Into the trees —” Carter, folding her map, follows without haste as the men jerk to their feet and fall back into the cover of the forest. A hush runs through the group as the rumble of tanks becomes more distinct.

Bucky takes a breath, holds it. Around the bend in the road, the first tank appears, taking the corner with a broad, jerky motion. As it draws closer, Bucky tightens her grip on her stolen gun, wishing for grenades, heavy artillery, anything that could make a difference against the hulking mass of the Hydra tank. And then — there’s something — she looks closer, to the stalk of the tank barrel, upon the very end of which is perched, wobbling delicately with the heaving of the tank over rutted road, a bowler hat. 

She exhales, grip softening. “It’s —” she mutters to Steve — “I think it’s —” just as the top of the tank creaks open a crack, and a familiar red-cheeked and -mustached face peeks out. “God _damn_ it,” Bucky says, slack with relief, and stumbles up the ditch to meet the now-slowing tank.

The top of the tank clanks open, Dum Dum shoving his torso up and grinning at Bucky. “Well, I’ll be goddamned,” he says, then shouts down into the interior of the tank, “I found Barnes!” Shoving himself up out of the tank, Dum Dum slides, gracelessly, down the side, and jumps off the tank’s tracks to the ground. Behind him, Jones pops his head out, bright smile splitting his face. 

“I told you Barnes would make it,” Jones says, scrambling to heave himself up over the edge. Dum Dum’s looking at Bucky like she’s a modern marvel; Bucky’s sort of hoping he won’t hug her and sort of resisting the urge to burrow herself between his big, dumb, goddamn arms. Jones saves her the dilemma by jumping to the ground and grabbing her tight, a fierce squeeze that presses against the bruising running up and down her ribs. She’s had hands all over her for three days — hands and machines and needles invading her — and she shouldn’t want to be touched, to be handled, to be jostled like a kid by a big brother, but she finds herself clutching Jones back, tears seeping from the corners of her eyes. 

When he pulls back, Jones grips her shoulders, looks at her hard. “Good to see you,” he says, dropping his hands. Dum Dum awkwardly claps her on the shoulder. 

“The others?” Bucky says, needing to ask right away.

“Oh, yeah,” Jones says, unconcerned. “Yanked themselves a supply truck; they should be along any minute.” True enough, just after he says it, the coughing backfire of an engine pushed a little too far out of gear sounds down the road, and then a truck trundles around the corner, followed by another tank and a motley handful of other vehicles.

At her shoulder, Steve’s gaping a little at the array, but Carter is grinning and, Bucky thinks, probably already making plans. “This oughta make our travels a little easier,” Bucky says to Steve, who looks over at her, startled. 

She sees, for one long moment, the uncertainty in Steve’s eyes that she knows, like an ache in her bones, the one that appears before Steve musters up something deep inside her and forges ahead, regardless of fear. She wants to tell Steve that she doesn’t have to do this, not on her own, that she’s not a soldier, that there are plenty of men of rank here, NCOs who could take over, but before she can, Steve’s turning to the group, slowly drawing out from the forest, and telling them that they’ll be breaking for a few hours to take inventory.

Steve bustles off, to do just that, before Bucky can introduce her to Dum Dum and Jones, or to Morita, Dernier, and Falsworth, who are climbing out of the cab of a truck, two of them looking greenish while Dernier grins, stepping down from the driver’s seat.

They barely get in handshakes all around before Morita and Dum Dum start in on comparing their escape tales, complete with body counts and a shared inspection of the massive pair of guns Morita and Dernier each have slung over a shoulder, bigger and blockier even than the strange rifle Bucky picked up. Sounds like they each of them killed half the compound’s Hydra soldiers, and Bucky could nearly believe it of them. 

Dernier says something to Jones, who laughs and says something about barrels of beer, and Bucky follows them all to take a look at their spoils, wedged into the back of the truck in precarious heaps, a partially-unloaded shipment jostled by Dernier’s driving. As Falsworth and Dum Dum argue over whether the barrels are likely to contain ale or lager, Morita squeezes her shoulder. 

“It’s good to see you,” he says.

“Yeah,” she says. “Yeah, you too,” and it is, it’s damned good to see the lot of them, alive and cheerful and with only a few bloodstains. There’s something in the crook of Morita’s smile that sends her mind skittering to Lee, to the comfortable weight of him against her arm in the foxhole, in the trench. They don’t look much alike besides the passing similarity of the way they both wear their dark hair, greased back, but in that moment Morita’s grin makes her miss Lee, immensely. 

It’ll be nice to have a few more days with them, even filled with ceaseless walking, before they get back to camp. Bucky thinks of herself as a practical sort, and she knows what awaits her at the other end of this road. Even if they don’t face invasive medical clearances and close examination over what they saw, learned, and said in the compound, the best she’ll get is a brief leave and reassignment to a new unit. If, as she suspects, they do encounter a battery of questioning and observation, then it’s only a matter of time before she meets her end with a court martial. 

Somewhere down the road, she hears Steve’s laugh, gentle and sweet, like something from another life dropped into a nightmare. Around the ache of hunger, her gut clenches.

++

“Hey-o, Miss Victory USA!” Morita crows as Steve circles around to their group near noontime. Steve flushes, gives an embarrassed little smile. Falsworth turns around and sweeps into a dramatic bow, and Steve looks like she might die on the spot.

“Heya, Buck,” Steve says, ignoring the men. Falsworth clutches at his heart but turns back around anyway, keeps marching. The flush on her cheeks looks healthy, and she’s not winded a bit, even though they’ve been marching for hours. She’s been busy, too; every time Bucky caught sight of her, she was bustling after this soldier or that, making sure everyone could move along alright or, if they couldn’t, that they got a spot on one of the trucks. Bucky’s feeling a little weary herself, feet stumbling over the loose gravel of the road, and Steve comes up next to her quicker than Bucky would have thought possible. She hoists Bucky’s arm up over her shoulders, like she maybe did once or twice at home when Bucky’d had a bit too much to drink. 

They don’t fit together well: Bucky’s shoulders brought up sharp by Steve’s new height, their feet not quite in sync. Steve’s shoulder is jamming uncomfortably into her armpit, where it used to come somewhere halfway up her ribcage. Bucky’s everything is sore, a dull, throbbing ache that shudders and jerks with each step, and Steve’s help isn’t really doing much. “Steve,” she mutters, and then again, louder, when Steve doesn’t respond — “Steve!” 

She turns, looks at Bucky. Straight at Bucky, not up. Blue eyes like the sky, cheeks flushed with cold. “What, are you okay, do we need to take a break —”

“No, dammit, I’m fine, I can walk without your piss-poor assistance.” Steve blinks, too used to Bucky’s sore moods to be hurt. “Find someone else who needs more help,” Bucky says, a little more evenly. Steve doesn’t answer, but she does shrug her shoulder down enough to let Bucky sling her arm off. Her hands don’t leave Bucky’s side until she’s taken a couple of unassisted steps forward, though. When Bucky glances up, Steve’s hands and body slipping away, leaving a sudden rush of cold air against her side and in her lungs, Jones is walking backwards in front of her, head cocked.

“Steve?” he says. Bucky wants to groan. 

Steve just looks at him and reaches out her hand. “Steve Rogers,” she says. “You know Bucky?”

“Gabe Jones. Locked up together,” he says, shaking her hand. Bucky wills him to trip on something, go ass-over. “Steve,” he says again, musingly, and it’s enough to get Dum Dum’s attention, who jerks his head around from a few paces ahead and says, “Bucky’s Steve?” as he stops dead.

Steve’s looking between Jones and Bucky; Bucky won’t meet her eye. “Yeah,” she says, cautiously. Bucky wishes she could step in and say _they don’t mean it that way_. She knows what she said, in the long restless night before she was taken away, but has had no time to wonder how they understood her. 

“You’re, um, different than we expected,” Jones says, diplomatic enough that it could cover both the fact that Steve’s pink-cheeked, muscled, and healthy as well as female.

“Jesus,” Dum Dum says. No diplomacy there. He tips his hat back, peers at Steve, who has to stop walking to avoid running into him. “I saw what you did in the bunker. What do they feed gals in Brooklyn?” Morita’s paying attention, now, and Falsworth and Dernier too, though they’re less obvious in their interest. 

Steve looks at Bucky, eyes wide, a little panicky. Bucky’s noticed, the way she’s been careful with her words, not saying a thing that would give Bucky away; she hasn’t figured out how to tell her yet that there’s nothing else to give away. That once she’s back at camp, she’ll likely be court-martialed, POW or not. Instead, she just shrugs up one shoulder, weary.

“A lot of cabbage stew,” Steve answers, finally, still looking at Bucky. She can feel her eyes on her, like pinpricks on the rise of her cheekbone. Dum Dum guffaws, starts walking again. 

“If they’re all like you two, I’ll have to make a visit,” Dum Dum says. His voice is quiet enough that it doesn’t carry, and Bucky sends up thanks for small miracles.

“If they’re all like them, I don’t think they’ll want you,” Jones says, drily; when Bucky looks up, startled, he gives her a lopsided grin. He’s still walking backwards, still looking at Bucky, who is trying not to panic at what he might say. It isn’t like he can make things worse for her; all he can do is tell Steve — tell Steve — tell her that Bucky cries out for her when she’s having nightmares, that Steve is most of what Bucky thinks about when she wonders why she’s over here.

“You’ll have to tell us stories,” Jones says, after a beat. “About what this one was like as a kid. I bet he was a real card.” He grins, turns back around; Bucky feels like she’s been winded, relief knocking the breath out of her, and it’s heady, sweet. 

Steve just laughs. “A real card,” she says, bumping her shoulder against Bucky’s. “That’s about right.” She walks with them for a bit longer before stepping away to make another round to check on the injured.

++

Once darkness falls that night, when men are curled on every conceivable piece of soft ground they can find, making beds from pine needles and pulling their threadbare uniforms around their shoulders, Steve checks in on Bucky before starting her patrol. Bucky would — if this were Brooklyn, a year and a half ago, Bucky would have grabbed her and put her to bed, tucked a blanket around her protesting shoulders; but it isn’t, and Steve tells her that she doesn’t need as much sleep, now, and Bucky can’t really believe it but has to.

She goes up on one elbow to look at Steve. Up at Steve, who crouches on her heels and reaches to her, like she’s going to cup her cheek. Her hand falls, instead, on Bucky’s bicep, gives it a friendly squeeze. The smile on Steve’s face is too tight, doesn’t reach her eyes. Bucky wants to pull her down on the ground next to her, to curl up tight and close; Bucky wants her to leave. 

“I’ll sleep,” she says, knowing it’s a lie.

She lies on her back and looks up at the sky, hints of flickering stars gleaming through the canopy of evergreen. Around her, the familiar sounds of a couple hundred men’s sleep settle in, sounding both expansive and insignificant in the vastness of the forest. Dum Dum’s also on patrol, and she nearly misses his chainsaw breathing. 

The ground below her is hard. Her wrists ache; she keeps her hands folded over her abdomen instead of down at her sides, just because she can. When she bends her arm, the sleeve of her jacket creases in her elbow, pressing against the blossoming bruise radiating out from her scabbed-over vein. She can’t remember, precisely, but she thinks he’d put a needle in her arm and left it there, bottles dripping liquid that burned her veins, that left her head stuffed full of cotton. In the hours since Steve pulled her off that table, her memories have started coming back — a slow, insidious drip drip drip like the poison he filled her up with — and she wishes they wouldn’t. 

Instead of closing her eyes, then, and trying to sleep, she sends her mind out to each of her limbs, catalogs her every injury. Her feet, sore from marching, but that’s familiar; her ankles bruised and reddened but not as chapped as her wrists. She’s had to stop once or twice to shake out a charley-horse, and phantom cramps haunt the muscles of her calves. Her gut is fucked up, churning dangerously as it works through the first solid food she’s had in days, and it burns when she pisses. It aches less when she breathes in now, fractionally, and her throat doesn’t have the same persistent rawness. Seems like whatever he did to her, the time strapped down to that godforsaken table cleared up her pneumonia. 

That’s something, she thinks, bitterly. Underneath her hands, her stomach rises and falls with her breath. She clenches her fists together, releases them. Closes her eyes. 

For one long moment, Bucky manages to keep her eyes closed, but then something rustles and _he_ is there, a glinting spark in the corner of her eye, his bland, cruel smile and his soft, relentless voice. She wrenches her eyes open. 

He hadn’t ever touched her, not with his hands; only his soldiers had done that, manhandled her and braced her down and tore at her clothes to find her veins. Her body bears his marks, nonetheless. In the blood pounding heavily through her veins, she can hear him say how _interesting_ she is, the lying soldier. He was so pleased when she stayed alive, backs of his fingertips nearly touching her cheek when he came back the second time, the third. Each time she convulsed with shocks, charges forcing their way through her muscles, down to her bones, he watched avidly, his face red and flushed, eyes roaming over her body. She came to like the way his eyes would narrow, his jaw tighten, when she refused to say anything but her name and number. He wanted her to talk, wanted to _know_ her; his needles and poisons and electricity shoved and stabbed and spread into her body, and he wanted her to bare herself still. She wouldn’t, she didn’t; she said the name the Army knows her by until her mouth was gummy and soft, until it was just words and armor, all that stood, tenuously, between her and the scattering of her mind.

She looks up at the sky and listens to the breathing of the men around her. The ground below her is hard, the air around her sharp, and she is alive. 

++

Bucky must sleep, because she wakes up. The sky filters rosy-pink through the treetops, and next to her, Steve sleeps curled on one side, facing Bucky. Her leather jacket is tossed over her shoulder, singed collar crumpled against her chin, and tucked up like that, hands folded against her chest and knees drawn up, she could almost be herself again, braced against the cold. Bucky doesn’t mean to wake her, intends to stand and walk away, but Steve blinks her eyes open as Bucky draws her feet under her and smiles sleepily. Bucky looks away, wipes the back of her hand across her mouth.

“Glad you got some sleep,” Steve says, shoving up to sit. “You needed it.”

_You don’t goddamn know what I need_ , Bucky wants to say back, sharp cut of anger biting into her gut. Instead she says, “Does that really need sleep?” and gestures up and down Steve’s body. 

Steve’s mouth thins, but she says, carefully, “Not as much.” She has her knees drawn up to her chest, feet planted on the ground. Some loose hair escapes from her braid, pasted with sweat and dirt to the side of her face. Bucky has ached to see her for sixteen months. “Bucky, I —” Steve starts, and Bucky shoves herself to her feet.

“We should think about starting,” she says, looking out across the jumbled clearing, at the men beginning to stir. 

Steve stands, a graceful roll to her feet. “Yeah,” she says. Her voice sounds far away. 

Later, once they’re on the road again, Steve finds Bucky, falls into step next to her. She doesn’t touch her, this time, and Bucky’s footsteps are steady. 

“Did it hurt?” Bucky says, into the silence. She’s been thinking it since her mind started to clear, wasn’t sure she could bear the answer. But if it did, it doesn’t seem to now; Steve moves with an ease she never had before. It’s not the real question, but she doesn’t need to ask that one. Bucky figures she knows why Steve up and did — whatever it was that got her remade this way. Bucky’s the one who taught her to fight with her fists, after all, no sense in being surprised that Steve doesn’t know any other way to go about it.

Steve looks over at her; Bucky swallows and doesn’t look back. “Yeah,” she says. “When it happened. But then it was like —” Steve breaks off, tips her head up toward the sky. Bucky does look at her, now, slides her gaze over and catches the way the sunshine glints on her hair, across her cheekbones. They’re both still walking, but Steve’s eyes flutter closed, like she’s taking in the scant warmth of the winter sun, like it’s offering her something she’s never felt before. “I stopped having pains I’d forgotten were even there,” she says, to the sky. Bucky’s chest aches.

“Guess it’s good, then,” Bucky says, around the guilt in her throat. Steve brings her chin back down, opens her eyes with a sigh. She’s just Bucky’s height; when she turns her head, her eyes catch Bucky’s and hold them, a little harshly. She looks like she wants to say something, but just grits her jaw a little and looks forward again. 

A while later, maybe twenty minutes of walking down a tree-lined dirt road with a hundred and sixty-two men around them, Steve says, “He was kind. The doctor who — his name was Erskine.” Bucky looks over at her; there’s a glint of damp in the corner of Steve’s eye, nothing more. Erskine is also the man who made Schmidt, that’s what he’d said. Bucky can’t think of it: a man who played a role in creating that monster putting his hands on Steve, too.

“He didn’t talk about Schmidt,” she says. Either she senses Bucky’s simmering anger or it’s been weighing on her own mind. “Not except to say that he had regrets. That the serum magnifies everything that’s already in a person, bad and good.” 

Something shivers in Bucky’s veins. She shrugs it off, says instead, “What happened to him?”

“Killed,” Steve says, simply and angrily. “By a German spy.” She doesn’t say anything else; Bucky doesn’t ask more. She didn’t know, she realizes, didn’t know or didn’t let herself think, that Steve’s war started long before she stormed into the Hydra camp, too. That’s not what Bucky wanted for her; but then, she’s not sure what she wants for Steve often figures into things.

“You know what else, though?” Steve says, a little more lightly. “Erskine’s partner was Howard Stark.”

Bucky looks over at her, sees the slanted grin on her face, small and pleased. “What? No shit.”

“Yeah,” Steve says, laughing. “He’s an asshole in person. You’d like him.” Bucky laughs out loud at that.

“Here I was, thinking you were stuck at home bored and really you’re stepping out with New York’s most famous playboy.”

Steve’s laugh is a sharp, pleased bark, loud enough to ring a little in the thin air. She shoves sideways, bumping against Bucky’s shoulders. “You jealous?” 

Bucky licks her mouth. “I don’t know,” she says. “He take you out in his flying car?”

“Not as such,” Steve says, wide grin coming easier now. “He did give me a ride into the mountains this one time I went chasing after a friend. But that was in an airplane.”

“Goddamn,” Bucky says. Howard fucking Stark, part of her rescue. “I’ll bake the man a pie.”

“Then we’ll be rid of him,” Steve says. Bucky gasps, mock outrage, and at the sly, slant-ways smile Steve gives her she feels a little jerk in the bottom of her gut. 

“Acting like my cooking didn’t get us through four years of winters,” Bucky says, her voice in her Ma’s imperious drag. 

“You’re right, Buck,” Steve says, dripping earnestness. “Came all the way to Europe just to see if you could cook me up some cabbage stew.”

“You’ve come to the wrong place, Rogers.” Goddamn if that isn’t the truth, though. “Ain’t seen anything like a fresh cabbage in months. It’s all c-rations.” Or the slop that passed as food in the compound, she doesn’t say. Doesn’t want to knock that easy grin off Steve’s face, not when she’s been thinking of it for coming on a year and a half. Instead she shrugs up one shoulder and says, “Find me a goddamn fresh vegetable and I’ll bake _you_ a pie.” Steve’s smile is wide, broad, big as the sun, and Bucky wants to kiss her, a rushing hot desire she hasn’t let herself think about for a long time. She doesn’t, now, tamps it down and bumps their shoulders together and keeps marching.

++

“Listen,” Dum Dum says, leaning toward the flickering campfire that evening with an uncharacteristically serious expression. “We need to plan if we’re going to have any control over what happens when we get back.” They’d stuck together while making camp that night without discussing it, building up a circle with broken-off logs and clustering together in a closed knot.

“Don’t think that’s how the army works,” Jones says, stabbing a sausage with a sharpened branch and holding it over the fire. 

“You never know,” Dum Dum says. Bucky catches the skeptical glance that passes between Jones and Morita. 

“What do you have in mind?” Falsworth says, patiently. 

“We’ve seen things,” he says. “Things that will be useful for the Army to know, and things that could make us useful.”

“Hydra, you mean?” Bucky says. She’d gotten the short version of it from Steve, to fill in what they’d figured out while in the compound. Experimental Nazi weapons division, pretty ahead of anything the Allies have put together so far, and headed up by Johann Schmidt. Bucky figures she knows at least one thing about Schmidt that someone in the Army should know, if they’ll even believe her. 

Dum Dum nods. “I don’t know about all of you, but I’d be happy to hunt down every last one of those bastards and kill them with my own two hands.” Across the fire, Falsworth snorts, but nods. They all do, even Bucky, who doesn’t much care about the faceless soldiers anymore. There’s just one man she wants to see again.

“You got a plan?” Morita says. 

“Figured I’d chat with our Misses Victory over there,” he says, gesturing to the spot where Peggy and Steve are seated. “They’ve gotta have some pull if they were sent out here all on their own.”

“I don’t —” Bucky starts, and then stops. No one sent them, she wants to say; Steve hasn’t confirmed as much, but Bucky’s been following her impulsive, righteous ass for coming on fifteen years. “Worth a try,” she says instead. “For you fellas. I think the brass will have other ideas for me.”

“Because of your girl?” Dum Dum says.

Bucky frowns, doesn’t correct him on _your girl_. “Because Uncle Sam might be less inclined to keep me around once they find out that I’m —”

“Who’s going to tell them?” Jones says, looking around the circle. Everyone meets his eyes, shaking their heads. 

“Yeah, but —”

“You’ve been fooling them for this long,” Jones says carefully. “There will be more scrutiny, sure, but —”

Something clutches at Bucky’s throat, panicky and hot. Jones is being kind, she knows he is, but he’s a goddamn fool if he thinks the government isn’t going to want to poke and prod at Bucky, to find out exactly what Zola did to her and how she managed to survive it when so many others didn’t. She shakes her head. “I think it will be more than that,” she says. “What happened, those last couple days —” she looks down at her hands, wrung together between her knees — “I think that might catch their interest.” 

A long beat of silence. They don’t know what happened to her, she knows. Don’t know about the hands, the needles, the shocks, the pervasive invasion of her body. The pain. 

“There’s no shame in anyone wanting to go home, not after all that,” Jones says, finally; anger flares up in Bucky’s chest. She’s not fragile, she doesn’t want — 

Jones adds, quickly, at her expression, “But if you don’t —”

“If you don’t, then that’s not the way you’re going to, not if we can do anything about it,” Morita finishes. Bucky heaves a deep breath, looks up from her clenched hands. It’s a nice fantasy, she thinks, these brothers-in-arms on her side. She may as well play it out.

“Yeah,” she says. “Yeah, okay, I want to stay in.” 

“Okay then,” Dum Dum says. “You wanna go talk to the ladies, or shall I?”

Bucky blinks at him. “Don’t call them ladies. Not if you want to walk away.” Across the way, Steve and Peggy are bent close, looking at some papers. Dum Dum laughs, gives her a little salute. 

Bucky faces the fire, keeps her back to Steve. She wants to stay. Wants it, even though she knows it won’t happen; can’t face the thought of running home to her family’s worried looks and relief. Steve’s gonna see it — Dum Dum’s pretty much telling her that Bucky’s ready to sign on for more, no matter what — and Bucky can’t kid herself that she’s doing it to protect Steve, anymore. 

They’ll be back to camp by midday tomorrow, at this pace. A scant twelve more hours to spend hoping her luck holds.

Dum Dum walks back to the group, gives an elaborate shrug. “Said they’d think about it,” he says, sitting down next to Dernier. Bucky can’t help but throw a glance back at Steve and Peggy; Steve meets her eyes like she’s been waiting for Bucky to look, and she jerks her gaze away. 

An hour or so later, they tamp down the fire to cinders and bunk down for the night. Steve’s already told her that no one with an injury or illness will do night patrols, and that she goddamn well was including Bucky in that group. It chafes, but Steve had said it right in front of the whole group, and Jones had glared at her like he’d pin her down himself if necessary. She’s feeling better, the catalog of her injuries starting to shrink, but she doesn’t figure Steve would listen to her if she said so any more than she’d ever listened to Steve, so she takes the reprieve along with the few dozen other men trying to make a recovery as best one can when on the road fleeing from enemy combatants. Steve doesn’t stay out too long, herself, coming round to the circle after half an hour or so and squatting down next to the spot where Bucky’s spread on her back, looking at the stars. 

“Mind if I —” she says, gesturing to the open ground next to Bucky, then sits down once Bucky’s given a little nod. She wouldn’t have waited, before, would have sat herself down and kicked her feet out and let her body go loose and comfortable with Bucky. Now, she lies down like she’s in a sarcophagus, stiff-backed and hands at her sides, and looks up at the sky, like Bucky. She holds her shoulders hard, tense, and Bucky thinks she might start talking, and that’s just about the last thing she thinks she could stand. 

She does; Bucky wants to clap her hands over her ears. “If they let you, will you stay?” Steve says, and Bucky had figured they’d dance around it, so she’s surprised for a minute at Steve’s matter-of-fact tone.

“Will you?” she says, instead of answering. Leaves rustle as Steve turns her head; Bucky can practically hear her annoyance. Bucky gives in, turns to look at her. In the darkness, Steve’s face is mostly shadow. “Well, I’ve gone to all this trouble,” Bucky says. They’re close enough that she can feel the huff of Steve’s exhale.

“Yeah,” Steve says. “Yeah, me too.” She reaches out with one hand and touches Bucky’s shoulder, her neck. Bucky leans into it, just a little, and thinks about moving closer, about tucking Steve up against her like she was still small.

Instead, she murmurs, “Get some rest,” and rolls onto her back again. The space between them is small enough to reach across; the sky above them is vast.


	9. Chapter 9

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Bucky slings her arm around Steve’s neck; Steve half-heartedly shoves at her. “My own Miss America,” Bucky says, and it comes out so warm and fond that Steve feels it, like honey pooling in her gut, and goes quite still. Bucky’s mouth is at her temple, her breath hot. She should be drunk, half a beer ago, but all she feels is a sort of warmth that’s only growing with the press of Bucky’s body against hers. Steve runs warm now, a damp trail of sweat at the base of her back underneath her slip and heat under her arms, but she can feel every inch where Bucky’s tight against her.

At the camp gates, the guards stare at them, shocked and slack-jawed, until Steve says, “Some of these men need medical attention right away. Radio ahead for medics.” 

They stare for another moment longer, until one of them fumbles for his radio and says, “Yes, uh, sir, uh, ma’am.” Another one jerks the gate up, letting them through, and they make their way into the camp, past long rows of outbuildings and lean-to tents and a growing crowd of shocked soldiers.

The first person to actually greet them, not just stare at the lines of men marching wearily into the camp, is Dolores, who runs forward and flings her arms around Steve’s neck, face pressed tight to the curve of her shoulder. Steve squeezes her back, feeling the pinprick of tears in the corners of her eyes.

“Thought you were dead,” Dolores says, pulling away. “They wouldn’t tell us anything.”

“I’m fine,” Steve says. The corners of Dolores’s eyes crinkle up. 

“Yeah, you are,” she says. She peers behind Steve, taking a look at the men behind her. “You find some new friends?”

Steve laughs. “Some new,” she says, but before she can reach for Bucky, bring her forward to introduce her to Dolores, Colonel Phillips shoulders his way to the front and narrows his eyes at the scene before him. They rest, briefly, on Steve before sliding sideways to Peggy. 

“Carter,” he says, “is there a reason you’re such a goddamn pain in my ass?”

“Just doing what comes naturally. Sir,” Peggy says. Behind them, Steve hears a choked-off laugh that she’s pretty certain is Bucky’s and thinks _you and me both, pal_. 

Phillips glares at her for one long moment. “Carter, my office, now. Bring the chorus girl with you,” he adds, and Steve’s hard-pressed not to roll her eyes.

“Sir, before — some of these men need medical attention,” Steve says, as Phillips turns away.

“Medics are on their way,” he says, without breaking stride. “So unless you’ve got some boo-boos of your own to take care of —” Peggy follows him, grimly determined set to her jaw. 

Steve looks over her shoulder at Bucky; she’s pale, teeth gritted hard together, but she gives Steve a wan smile. Steve wants to say _be careful_ or _come with me or don’t leave my sight_ , but instead she just nods at Bucky, who answers with a dip of her chin, and turns to follow Peggy.

“What the goddamn hell did you think you were doing?” Phillips says, before the tent flap has even fallen closed behind Steve.

“With respect, sir,” Peggy says, “while a bollocking, I’m sure, is very much in order, may I first suggest that we get Howard Stark here as soon as possible. In addition to the one hundred and sixty-three men Steve and I rescued from Hydra, we also liberated a good handful of guns, plans, and maps, and Steve here had a lovely chat with the man who was Erskine’s first test subject. We could use Stark’s mind on this.”

Phillips is looking at Peggy like she’s a bug he’d very much like to crush, and Peggy’s shoulders are square and her jaw set and her brow unfurrowed. “Fine,” he says, finally. “But don’t think you’re getting out of that bollocking.”

“Wouldn’t dream of it,” Peggy says, unruffled. When Phillips looks down at his desk, though, Steve sees the way her shoulders settle, just a little. 

“Rogers,” he says, looking back up. “I gather the show must go on. We’ve arranged transport for you girls at thirteen hundred hours.” It’s twelve thirty-seven now.

“Sir,” Steve starts. She draws her shoulders up and back, like Peggy’s, thinks about what they’d talked about last night. “I know you wanted an army of super soldiers and only got me, but with respect, sir, I still think I can be of use.”

Phillips tilts his head. He’s not immediately dismissing her, which is maybe more than she expected. “You have something in mind, Rogers?” he says, and she could grin, could kiss him.

“I’m not asking for you to put me in the 107th,” Steve says. “Give me a team, let us chase down Hydra.”

Phillips looks between them. “This your idea?” he asks Peggy. She shrugs up one shoulder. It’s a group effort, really, Dum Dum’s proposal sparking into something with more form. “I’d have to call Washington,” he says. Steve bites the inside of her cheek to keep from grinning.

“You don’t technically need to, though,” Peggy says, mildly. “Private Rogers was never discharged, just put on Reserves. You have the authority to commission her as an agent, under the auspices of the SSR.” Phillips narrows his eyes, and for a long moment Steve thinks Peggy’s tried to handle him too much. 

“You’re suggesting I, what, give you permission to form a secret Hydra-fighting team?”

Peggy shrugs. “I find that one solves more problems when willing to consider unconventional solutions.” Steve’s prepared for this, if their plan is to work. There’s no way the first fully integrated unit, with two foreign nationals, and a leader who never advanced past Private and is a woman, will ever be able to have a public face. They’ll work in secret, uncelebrated and unclaimed. 

Phillips looks at Peggy, then Steve, then back at Peggy. This isn’t a decision he wants to make, it’s clear. “I’ll see what men I can spare,” he says, lifting his pen in a gesture of dismissal.

Steve clears her throat. “I’ve already started, sir.”

“You don’t just get the pick of my goddamn army just because you think you’re special, Rogers,” Phillips says, glancing up at her, brow heavy. 

“With respect, sir. It’ll be a small team, and I’ll need men with certain – characteristics.” 

“Men who will listen to a woman in command,” Peggy supplies dryly, to Phillips’s bemused look. He scoffs; she smiles grimly. 

“They volunteered,” Steve says, which is true in spirit if not in technical detail. “If we’re to go after Hydra, they have experience that will be useful.” 

Phillips sighs. He doesn’t scrub his hand over his face or anything so outwardly demonstrative, but he looks like he’s simultaneously convincing himself to do it and that it’ll be a terrible idea. Who knows, it might be. Finally, he lifts a sheet of paper, passes it to Steve. “Give me your names,” he says. “I’ll have my secretary draft contracts.”

Steve’s blood thrums as they leave the tent. She wants to find Bucky right away. 

Peggy laughs softly as the tent flap shuts. “I didn’t quite think he’d go for it,” she admits. “You were wonderful.” She gives Steve a bright-eyed smile that has Steve’s stomach twisting up, not unpleasantly. 

“I need to find Bucky,” she says. “All the guys, really — gotta convince them this is what they had in mind.” 

“They’ll do it,” Peggy says, with surety. “First, um —” She touches Steve’s elbow, stopping her before she can step away. “When Howard arrives, I think it might be prudent to have him examine Sergeant Barnes. Rather than any of the medics, I mean. He’s not a medical doctor precisely, but —” She gives Steve a significant look. “He can be very — discreet, when the situation warrants it.” Steve nods, feeling a little guilty that she hadn’t thought of it. She knows Bucky’s settled into the Army comfortably, built herself a place here, but the interest that is about to be upon her could, potentially, be far more invasive than she’s encountered. 

“Thank you,” she says. “I’ll make sure Bucky knows.” 

“Talk to them,” Peggy says. “I’ll find you later.” She steps away, no doubt ready for a wash and a clean set of clothes. 

Steve’s heading toward the mess hall when she hears her name shouted over the general excited din. Phillips has redirected all but essential duties for the day while the camp frantically — and with no small bit of relief — makes room for the newly-arrived men, and soldiers bustle left and right with furniture, food, and supplies. Weaving through the crowd, she sees Bess waving at her, and remembers with a jolt that the company is scheduled to leave any minute now. 

She pulls Bess into an encompassing hug when they reach one another. “Dolores said — but we were so worried — they wouldn’t say anything —” Bess babbles against Steve’s neck, hand clutching at the back of her jacket. She pulls back, finally, eyes wide. “You know they’re sending us off today? You better get your gear together —”

“I, uh —” Steve rubs at the back of her neck. “I’m not going with you.”

“What?” Bess steps back, peers at her. “They’re not sending you home, are they? You rescued all these men!” She gestures behind them, looking around like she’s finding someone to give a talking-to.

“No! The opposite, actually.” Steve looks at the ground and resists the urge to scuff her feet. Every thought she’s had the past few days has been focused on the immediate future; she hadn’t quite let herself consider what it would be like to have to say goodbye to the only friends she’s had near for the past year and half. “They’re putting me to work, on my own team.”

Bess blinks, staring at her for a long moment. “And you want that?” she asks, and then — “Yeah, course you do.” Steve shrugs up her shoulders, feeling a little helpless. She does want it, now that it’s in reach; she might have been content being put to work where ever they’d have her, but now she can nearly feel her nerves thrum with the hope of it all.

“It’s why I volunteered,” she says. “You know that.”

Bess nods, shoulders falling. “Hell,” she says. “You’d better come say goodbye to everyone.”

The tent falls silent, shocked, at Steve’s awkward announcement. Joan looks like she might burst into tears, Bess hangs in the back scowling, and Dolores won’t meet her eyes. Aggie’s the first to walk up and give her a hug.

“Don’t get yourself killed,” she says, a touch breathless. “Continuez à travailler sur le français.”

“Oui,” Steve responds. “Je vais essayer.” Her accent is still a bit harsh, she knows, coming with none of Aggie’s fluidity, but Aggie’s taught her enough to carry on a conversation. She’s always picked up languages quick, knows a smattering of Italian and Irish and Yiddish just from living in the neighborhoods she’s grown up in, but it comes even quicker now, her memory snapping the words up and holding them close. 

She gets hugs from the whole troupe, and makes promises to write, and perhaps sniffles back a few tears. As Joan clings to her and tells her to stay safe, Bennett sticks his head in the tent to shout at them to get moving. 

Only Dolores lingers as the rest say final goodbyes and pick up their packs. Her eyes are shining; when she looks up and catches Steve’s eye, Steve feels the last of her tears spill over. “This is the dumbest idea, Rogers,” she says, gnawing at her lower lip. Steve can’t do anything but shrug; it probably is. Dolores looks at her, looks away, and Steve knows it’s guilt, not pain, that wrenches up her stomach. “I met Bucky,” Dolores says after a long pause. “Are you staying to take care of him or are you staying for yourself?”

They might be the same thing; Steve’s not sure. She says: “I’m staying because I can help. I want to help.”

Dolores looks at her, hard. “Sure,” she says, a little coolly. She takes a deep, jagged breath and settles her shoulders, then gives Steve the smallest hint of a smile. “Kiss me before you go?” she says, quiet in the empty tent, and Steve nods, swallows, and cups one hand around Dolores’s jawline. Her mouth is soft and yielding; Steve’s never had a goodbye kiss before, not with a parting like this. Steve hopes she will see her again.

They break off as Aggie calls Dolores’s name through the door, impatient. Steve stands in the empty space for a long moment after she leaves, listening to the sound of their truck driving away. The troupe will head south from here, around to Salerno and across the sea to North Africa. There were rumors that they’d head to the Pacific next. They might do, yet; the show will be fine without Steve.

Steve’s mouth is dry, her head pounding a little. She needs water, and food, and to convince a prospective team of mis-matched soldiers to follow her back into the unknown.

++

She finds them in the mess, along with every other man well enough to temporarily avoid the medics. Steve swings on the bench next to Bucky and asks her in an undertone if she’s been to the medical bay yet.

“No,” Bucky says, hard glint in her eyes. 

“Don’t,” Steve says, “not yet. I’ll tell you why.” A little crease furrows up between Bucky’s brows, but she nods.

Steve turns to the rest of the group, who are practically licking their plates clean. Her stomach rumbles; she’s been running on a diet scant even for her own previous appetite for a few days now, and her new body’s much more demanding. Bucky must hear it, because she shoves her tray over, half a slab of grilled tinned beef and some anemic peas left. “I’ll get more,” Bucky says to Steve’s glare. “They’re not holding back for us prodigal sons.” 

“Fine,” Steve says. “But don’t push yourself, or it’ll all come back up,” she adds, pointedly. They both know from experience, Bucky having learned to watch Steve carefully when she was coming off a fever, broth and bland oatmeal only.

“Yes, Ma,” Bucky says. Across from her, Dum Dum snorts. “You come here to nag me, or do you have news?” She says it teasingly, but Steve thinks she can hear the pull of hesitation under Bucky’s words.

“I talked to Colonel Phillips,” Steve says, to the whole group. “Got a proposition for you.” She outlines the general idea of the team, as much as she knows it. “It’d be just us, maybe Peggy — Agent Carter — sometimes, too, on Hydra’s tail.”

“With you in command?” Dum Dum says, not unchallengingly. 

“Yeah,” Steve says. “I told Phillips I didn’t think any of you would have a problem with that.” She doesn’t look at Bucky, but holds eye contact with each of the guys in turn. No one says anything.

“Do you know what you’re doing?” Morita asks, into the uncomfortable silence.

“Not a fucking clue,” Steve says, honestly. “What they taught me in Basic, what I’ve read. But I can listen. And I’m trying to put together a team that’ll be worth listening to.” 

The men look at each other. Falsworth rubs his palms together, Dum Dum knocks his bowler back on his forehead a little, brow furrowed. 

“Hell,” Jones says. “Barnes, what do you think?”

Bucky takes a deep breath in, through her teeth. Steve can’t look at her, wants to close her eyes; she forces them up, to Bucky’s face, instead. Bucky glances at the ceiling, at her hands. At Steve. She’s resigned, Steve thinks, not happy, but reconciled to Steve’s choice. “Steve’s never backed down from a fight,” she says, simply. “And I’ve been following her into them since I was seven years old. Ain’t gonna stop now.” Steve wants to cry, to grip Bucky’s hand. Instead, she watches the way Bucky dips her chin down, sucks in her lip, then straightens. 

“Yeah, alright,” Jones says. 

“Not much of a better endorsement than that,” Falsworth adds, nodding. 

“You understand it’ll be secret,” Steve says, “This isn’t something the Army’ll want to advertise.”

“Ce n’est rien de nouveau,” Dernier says, slow enough for Steve to catch it. “J’en suis.” Jones grins, knocks their knuckles together. 

Morita nods, smile spreading. “I’m ready to take out some more Hydra bastards,” he says. 

Dum Dum’s the last to say anything. He looks Steve up and down, appraisingly, then lifts one shoulder in an exaggerated shrug. “I’ll try anything once,” he says; it could sound lecherous, but somehow he makes it sound more like he’s taking on a dare, and from what Steve knows of him, a wager is one of his favorite things.

She has a team. “Alright,” she says, “You’ll have new papers to sign this afternoon.” 

“One condition,” Dum Dum says, a little more somberly. Her stomach flutters. “Whenever we next find a real town, with a real bar, you’re buying the first round.”

Steve laughs, soft relief flooding her. “Yeah,” she says, “Yeah, I can do that.”

She’s just finished up a third helping of canned corned beef, salty and fried up too quickly to have any sort of texture, when a wide-eyed Private with his cap in his hands comes over to their table. “Agent Carter wants you, sir, uh, ma’am,” he squeaks at Steve. 

“Thank you, Private,” Steve says, standing up. He stares at her. “Uh — dismissed,” she adds. That part might take a little getting used to. “Walk with me?” she says to Bucky, who’s stayed pretty quiet as Steve finished up eating, even as the rest chatted away. She nods, and stands.

“Howard Stark’s coming in,” Steve says, as they leave the mess. “Peggy figures he’d be the best fella to look you over. Just to see that you’re healthy —” she adds, at Bucky’s alarmed look. “She says he’s — discreet.” Steve shrugs up one shoulder. She doesn’t know Howard that well, it’s true, but he did show up when Peggy called him, and that’s something. 

“Yeah, okay,” Bucky says, unenthusiastically. 

“Once we’ve got the team in place,” Steve says, “I don’t figure they’ll be looking that closely at any of us. Not like that.” 

“You trying to protect, me, Steve?” There’s a challenge in Bucky’s voice, one she hasn’t heard since they were kids tussling on the floor, hair-pulling and dirty fighting, before Bucky had decided that she needed to be a little softer with Steve. Steve’s missed it, just a little, she realizes.

So: “What of it?” she says in return.

“ _Don’t_ ,” Bucky says, emphatically. 

“I just —” Steve stops, between two buildings, looks at the way the sunshine falls in a slash across Bucky’s face. “I wanna know you’re alright, is all. The table — the things in that room —” the way Bucky’s head had lolled, lifelessly, to one side before Steve could wake her. Bucky’s expression is unreachable, distant, like nothing Steve’s seen before; it cuts into her gut, the unfamiliarity. 

“Fine,” Bucky says, and starts walking again. “But I’ll smash his jewels if he tries anything out.” Steve snorts. That’s not really what Bucky’s worried about, she figures, but she wants to make Steve laugh, so Steve laughs.

“He’d probably deserve it,” she says.

++

Peggy’s waiting for them in Phillips’s office, which is currently absent the Colonel himself. She’s unruffled when Bucky follows Steve in, just pulls a second file from a pile on the desk, brings it over to the table in the corner, just big enough for the four chairs haphazardly shoved in around it.

“As an SSR Agent,” Peggy says, pushing a folder across the table to Steve, “you’ll have a functional rank equivalent to a Captain. Your men will carry their current ranks, which puts Sergeant Barnes as your second followed by Sergeant Dugan.” 

Steve flips open the folder, the first page of which outlines precisely what Peggy just said. “I outrank you, then,” she says, only because Phillips hasn’t joined them yet.

“Don’t push your goddamn luck,” Peggy says, but it’s with a wry grin. She passes Bucky the second folder. “You achieved your rank very quickly, Sergeant,” she observes. “Congratulations.”

“Yeah, well, that’s what happens when your S.O. is killed in the field and the brass needs someone to take over.” Bucky leaves her folder flat on the table, palms pressed down against it, unopened. Steve hadn’t known that. 

“It does,” Peggy says, unruffled. “I’m relying on you to not let it happen again.” Something passes between them. It should annoy Steve, being handled; she lets it be and looks down at her file.

The next few pages look like very complicated secrecy agreements. As she figured, the SSR, the Army, or both are not terribly interested in admitting that this squad exists. Which means that if something should happen to any one of them, it will not be commemorated or rewarded; if one of them dies, their families will know no more than the barest details. If they find themselves lost or captured, no rescue squad will come for them. Steve flips to the final page, which awaits her signature, and touches the pen Peggy slides across.

“Before —” _before I sign_ , she wants to say, or perhaps _before Phillips comes in_ — “it’s just. This is an awful big promotion, for someone whose only combat experience is one sort of hare-brained, poorly-thought-out rescue.” She has six soldiers behind her on little more than her own bravado and Bucky’s say-so, and Bucky’s the stubbornest person she knows after her own self, but they’re loyal to each other, and she would have said the same in her shoes. 

Peggy tilts her head. “First of all, while you might not have had a single plan other than walking to Austria, I, in fact, did, thank you very much. As for the other, yes, you are vastly under-qualified for this promotion. In some ways,” she adds, with a shrug. “In other ways, you’re precisely what a team like this needs.”

Folding her hands on the table in front of her, Peggy goes quiet, watching Steve. “Are you — are you going to tell me what those ways are?” Steve ventures.

“No,” Peggy says simple, as Phillips walks in.

“Ah, my favorite insubordinate duo,” he says. “And, if I had to hazard a guess, Sergeant Barnes.” Bucky stands, at attention, until he waves her to ease and takes one of the chairs. “This is a peculiar team you’ve put together,” he says, gesturing to the stack of files.

“Sir,” Steve says, not really certain if he requires an answer.

“They’re all yours, so long as they volunteer. And sign their name to that effect. Agent Carter will be in charge of selecting missions, though the final say-so comes through me, if it comes to that.”

“Yes, sir.” Steve glances at Peggy; her expression is a mask of patience, a veneer slipped on of which she can only just see the edges. Peggy’s gaze slides to Steve, then away, placidly. 

“You’ll train in England for two weeks before I send your fool asses on any missions. That’s all. Get out of my office.”

“Sir.” Steve salutes; Phillips waves her away. 

Outside the tent, Peggy leads them toward her own tent, which Steve will share for the time being. Steve’s quite intimately aware that she could use a wash and a fresh set of clothes. 

“You’re in charge of missions,” Bucky says as they walk. “That mean you ain’t gonna come on them with us?” There’s a drag to her voice Steve doesn’t recognize for a long moment, until she catches the way Bucky tilts her chin to one side, lets her mouth soften. She’s _flirting_.

Peggy must catch it, too, because she says, “I find I work better alone.”

“Maybe you haven’t found the right partner,” Bucky says. Steve wants to clear her throat, to forcefully remind Bucky that she’s right next to her, but she also hasn’t seen that cant to Bucky’s mouth, the gentle little grin she gives, in so long; it’s barely a ghost of what it was before the war, when jokes fell easy between them, but it’s still sweet.

“Perhaps,” Peggy says, but she’s looking at Steve, who feels a rush to her cheeks. She’s almost thankful, she thinks, when they get to Peggy’s tent. Peggy hesitates a moment before gesturing them both in.

“You don’t mind, though?” Steve says. Peggy lifts an eyebrow. “The extra work.”

“Steve, I’ve already been doing most of it — code breaking, data analysis. I’ve only been waiting for them to give me the right team of nutters stupid enough to take them on.”

Bucky laughs. “Guess we’re your guys, then.”

“Idiots, every one of you,” Peggy agrees. “Don’t worry, I won’t save all of the best missions for myself. There will be plenty of opportunities for your particular skill sets.” There’s something a little teasing in her tone, and Steve feels a little like she’s in the pictures, like there’s something there she isn’t quite picking up.

“You’re not going to make us go undercover, are you?” she asks.

Peggy turns and eyes her, actually looks her up and down. “Are we negotiating, Rogers?”

Steve thrusts her chin out, before she realizes that she doesn’t need to make herself look taller; she towers over Peggy. “I suppose we are, Agent Carter.” Behind her, Bucky gives a low whistle. Peggy’s glare flicks over to her before settling back on Steve.

“Sometimes a disguise is necessary,” Peggy says mildly. Very little about Peggy is mild. Steve straightens up a little, the teasing inflection of the air falling away.

“It’s not for me. I always made sure everyone I tussled with knew who they were fighting,” she says. She knows it’s not the same – scrappy playground fights, knock-down-drag-outs in back alleys – but she can’t stomach trickery. “Besides,” she adds, trying not to flush, “I’ve been to the pictures. I don’t want to –” She stops. She’s not sure what all Peggy’s job requires of her; doesn’t want to insult her.

Peggy looks bewildered; Bucky snorts. “Sergeant Barnes? Want to share something?”

“Not much,” Bucky says laconically. “Just, if you send Steve in to seduce the enemy, can I come?”

Steve glares over her shoulder; Peggy coughs. “I’m sure that won’t be necessary,” she says drily. 

“We all have our skills,” Bucky says, still snickering a little bit. Steve looks over her shoulder at her, glaring, and for one long moment it’s 1939 again and Bucky is laughing over some bad joke, mirthful and bright. But when she meets Steve’s eye, her own are straining with the effort of levity, red and hollow. 

++

They fly up to England a few days later. “So you can learn to jump out of an airplane the right way,” Peggy says, leading Bucky to narrow her eyes at Steve suspiciously.

“I landed,” Steve protests. “That seems like the right way to me.”

They get a full day’s leave before they start, set loose on the hamlet of Little Staughton, just outside of which resides the Army base where they’ll bunk for the next two weeks. With seasoned practice, Monty finds them a pub and Steve stands them the first round of drinks, as promised. They claim a sticky table near the darts board, and Steve wanders over to where Bucky’s leaning up against a quiet stretch of the bar. It’s early yet, the pub only just filling up, and her new team is making enough of a racket for twenty men, all except Bucky. 

She has her elbows propped on the bar behind her, one foot hooked in the brass rail at its base, and is peering at something on the wall. Steve wants to cover her face when she sees it: one of their tour posters, from when they came through this way before heading to the Front, with Hodge holding up his shield flanked by Steve and a bundle of faceless chorus girls. 

“I liked the uniform,” Bucky says, taking a sip of her beer and looking sidelong at Steve. “You should wear more sequins.” Steve might be imagining the way Bucky’s glance drags up her body, lingering on her breasts. The uniform had been snug.

“Shut it,” Steve says, feeling her cheeks heat up. She pulls out a stool and sits down to cover it. Bucky spins around, sits down next to her. They’re nearly brushing shoulders.

“Miss Victory USA,” Bucky continues. She leans forward on her elbows, looking up at the poster. Steve’s just background to Hodge, only a little bigger than the chorus line. She hasn’t attempted the hair again, not since leaving in the middle of the show. “Has a nice ring to it.”

“It was going to be Miss America,” Peggy says, sliding into the seat next to Steve. Steve groans, drops her head to the bar. “Until they remembered that already existed.”

Steve doesn’t have to even look to see Bucky’s expression of sheer joy, but she cracks one eye open anyway. Bucky’s grin splits her face wide open. “Now that,” Bucky says, pounding one fist on the bar for emphasis, “is the worst goddamn decision you all ever made.”

“I’ll be sure to pass that on,” Peggy says, dryly. 

Bucky slings her arm around Steve’s neck; Steve half-heartedly shoves at her. “My own Miss America,” Bucky says, and it comes out so warm and fond that Steve feels it, like honey pooling in her gut, and goes quite still. Bucky’s mouth is at her temple, her breath hot. She should be drunk, half a beer ago, but all she feels is a sort of warmth that’s only growing with the press of Bucky’s body against hers. Steve runs warm now, a damp trail of sweat at the base of her back underneath her slip and heat under her arms, but she can feel every inch where Bucky’s tight against her. 

“Do you like to dance?” she says to Peggy, to stop thinking about the way Bucky’s thumb brushes against her neck. 

“I do,” Peggy says. “Are you asking?”

“Um,” Steve says; she’s not sure. She thinks about Dolores, whirling her around on the floor and propping herself up in Steve’s arms as she laughed, giddy and tipsy, and the way no one in the dance hall had worried a lick about two gals dancing together. 

“I’ve danced with soldiers in their cups before,” Peggy says dryly. “They tend to get handsy.”

“Hey,” Bucky mutters in protest, leaning more heavily on Steve. 

“Then yes, I am,” Steve says quickly, slipping out from under Bucky’s arm. Bucky squawks something that sounds put-out, but Steve ignores it to take Peggy’s hand. 

They’re mostly hopeless together, Steve’s only real dance training in the limited steps she did on stage and the awkward two-steps both Bucky and Dolores have tried to teach her. But Peggy grins up at her, and spins herself around under Steve’s hand, and leads fairly effectively. “You’re a terrible partner,” she says to Steve, at a lull in the beat, and touches her cheek, smiling so widely that Steve stumbles again just looking at her.

“Um,” she says, watching the sweep of Peggy’s lashes as she laughs and drops her gaze. 

The music ends; someone calls out for a new song. Steve steps away from Peggy, hands reluctant to leave the steep curve of her hip. When she looks back at the bar, Bucky’s stool is empty. “I should —” she says, not quite sure how to finish the sentence. Peggy’s glance follows hers.

“Go ahead,” she says, but then touches Steve’s elbow. “We start training tomorrow,” she adds. “You might also make sure your team can — stand up in the morning.”

“Right.” That might, in fact, be more of a chore than Steve is up for, given the state of them. Dernier and Jones are arguing heatedly in French, not seeming to notice the way each slap of their hands on the table top sends a quivering slosh of beer over the edge of a too-full pint glass. Dum Dum has moved on to whiskey, and Falsworth appears to be meeting him drink-for-drink. Morita might actually be asleep, sitting up.

Reaching over Falsworth’s shoulder, Steve grabs the half-empty bottle of whiskey and says, “Alright, fellas, training at 0800, time to hit the hay.”

“Whiskey’s not done yet,” Dum Dum says, swiping for the bottle. Steve holds it out of his reach and tilts her head. He lumbers to his feet and peers at her, reaching for the bottle again. With one hand, she presses against his chest, holding him at bay, and with the other brings the bottle to her mouth and drinks. 

It burns as it goes down, and she feels one glorious, heady moment of drunkenness as it zips quickly into her bloodstream then clears. She clunks the bottle on the table and does the same for the one sloshing pint still untouched. 

“What.” Dum Dum says as Steve wipes her mouth.

“Briefing, 0800,” she repeats. “If you smell like liquor, I’ll throw you into the Thames myself.”

++

Steve has her own room, in a converted barracks that also houses a few dozen ATC gals and the occasional WAAF squad, but she’s not very surprised to see Bucky sprawled across her cot when she gets in. On the walk back from Austria, Steve had always found herself curling up on the ground next to Bucky, close enough to reach out and touch. At camp, the bunk assignments were apparently a disaster when Steve and Peggy returned with two hundred more men than the camp had been built to hold, and Bucky and the rest of the guys had commandeered a tent somewhere not too far from command. Knowing she was with folks who seemed to care about her well-being was the only thing that had stopped Steve from grabbing Bucky and barricading her in the tent she shared with Peggy; that and the fact that she’s given Phillips enough to overlook, and what would appear to be blatant mixed-gender fraternization might push him over the edge.

Maybe Bucky missed sharing the same air as much as she had.

The door clicks softly after Steve steps inside, and Bucky jerks to alertness, hands scrambling at her sides.

“Just me,” Steve murmurs; Bucky’s eyes snap to her, wild and startled, then she takes a breath, closes them for a long moment. When they open again, they’re calmer. 

“Wasn’t sure you’d be coming back to your own bunk,” Bucky says.

“What?”

“You were enjoying yourself, dancing.” With Peggy, she doesn’t say, and Steve feels a hot flush rush up her cheeks. Bucky notices; her eyes go wide. “God, Steve, sorry, I didn’t mean — my brain’s still asleep. I didn’t mean — _that_.” She stands up, shoves at the hem of her uniform jacket to get it to lay flat. “I know you’re not like that, I’m sorry.”

Bucky strides toward the door; Steve’s brain tries to catch up with her words. She grabs Bucky’s elbow before she can leave. They both look down at where Steve’s hand is tight around Bucky’s arm, and she drops it, fast, but Bucky stays.

“Like what?” Steve says, but she thinks she knows. “Peggy and I aren’t — but that doesn’t mean —”

Bucky’s eyes blink wide. In the dim light, the pupils are inky black, huge. “You’re normal, you’re not —” Steve’s pulse throbs; she can’t swallow around the heaviness in her throat. She wills Bucky to finish her thought, to just goddamn _say_ it, but instead Bucky says, almost a whisper, “This isn’t the life you’re supposed to have.”

“You think you get to decide that?” Steve wants to shove her. She keeps her hands at her sides, stiffly.

“No, I just — I just want you safe. Why couldn’t you just stay at home, where you were safe?” She must be a little drunk; her voice is mournful.

This time, when Steve grabs Bucky, it’s forceful enough to pull her back in front of Steve, where they’re eye-to-eye. “What’s this about? You can fight, but I’m not good enough?”

Bucky stares at her. The bruise on Bucky’s temple is almost gone now, just a faint circle of yellowed skin, but the dark circles under her eyes make her look like she’s been in the ring three rounds and come out the loser. “It feels real good now,” she says, almost a whisper. “On leave, the celebrated hero.” There’s no venom in her voice, but it still feels like ice in Steve’s bloodstream. “That’s not what it’s like. You’re gonna find that out, you’re gonna — it’s gonna be —” Steve thinks, for a long moment, that Bucky’s about to tell her something — something about the lab, about what Howard Stark had said that left her pale and quiet after he took a look at her, something about all that shit she won’t talk about. Instead, she shakes her head, and hot, guilty anger wells up in Steve’s chest. She reaches out to Bucky’s arm again; she wants to shake her, but instead just holds her there, in place.

“Fuck you, Bucky,” she spits. “Do you think you’re the only one who cares about — about _doing_ something? _You_ weren’t safe, you got yourself fucking captured, you could have — you could have been — am I supposed to sit at home and wait?” Her chest heaves. Under Steve’s too-strong hand, Bucky’s arm is hard, narrow muscle. There will still be a bruise tomorrow; this is what they are, now.

“Yes,” Bucky spits back at her, taking a step closer. Their eyes are level now; they never have been before. “Because I can’t think about keeping you safe and still do my job.” 

“I can look out for myself, now, Buck.”

Bucky flinches, like Steve slapped her, and Steve knows as soon as she sees it that it’s not true, her words. Not precisely. She lets go of Bucky’s arm, drops her hand uselessly to her side. “I just mean —” She looks down; Bucky’s boots haven’t been polished properly since they got back, and they’re streaked with mud. Non-regulation, she thinks, slightly hysterically. “I can, but I don’t want to.” 

When she drags her gaze back up, Bucky’s mouth is parted. Her breath comes in short heaves. “I want you watching my back,” Steve says. “Like you always have. And I want to have a chance to do the same for you, now that I can.”

Bucky breathes out, shuddering. “I never needed that, Steve,” she says. “I never would have asked.”

That’s the problem, Steve thinks. “I’m offering,” Steve says. 

Reaching one hand out, Bucky touches Steve’s chest, above her breast, just two fingers making delicate contact. 

When they were young, and Mass was something to be endured daily, Steve would stare at the painting above the altar while the priest’s words washed over her. Christ’s mournful face, his eyes solemn and dark, and two fingers held up in blessing. She would wonder how it would feel, to receive that benediction: would it be just like any other touch, or would she feel blessed at its contact? Would it be like knowing you had the right answer on an exam, or like the welling strength she felt when yelling at a bully, or like the way her Ma looked at her, soft and gentle, when her fever turned and she was awake to the world again?

Bucky touches her, and she can only answer in one way. She leans in; Bucky doesn’t move. Her fingertips press harder against Steve’s chest, and so Steve puts her mouth on Bucky’s, an answering press. Her eyes are open, so she can see the way Bucky’s flare wide then flutter closed. Her mouth is hot, dry, and when Steve shoves a little closer, she opens it with a caught little gasp that clutches something hard and deep in Steve’s stomach. Their teeth clack together; Steve wants to consume her.

Bucky pulls away, long before Steve is ready, hands clutching at her jacket, and stares at Steve. Her mouth is wet and open, and Steve wants to touch inside it, to feel the soft parts of her tongue and palate. “God _damn_ it,” Bucky says, and she’s nearly crying — Steve knows the tell in the tremble of her eyelashes — but she brings her hands up to Steve’s neck, fumbles with the button at her collar, and then the next. 

Steve wants to undress her, to pull at all the layers she so carefully arranges across her shoulders, her chest, but Bucky’s tugging at her buttons frantically, and gasping like she might cry, and so Steve just clenches at Bucky’s uniform jacket, wool under her fingers, and lets Bucky tug her blouse out of her waistband to flutter open. 

“You —” Bucky says to Steve, who is no more exposed to her than she has been before, utilitarian beige slip and olive skirt, shirt hanging open from her shoulders. But now her chest rises and falls evenly, her breasts fill out her brassiere, her collarbone doesn’t stand out, narrow and frail. Shrugging her shoulders, she drops the blouse to the ground and meets Bucky’s eyes.

“I’m safe,” she says, holding her arms out to her sides. This new body is proof enough of that. Bucky makes a hard, broken little sound and shoves up against her, crushing her mouth to Steve’s and pushing them both backwards, toward the cot. Steve’s blood rises hot to the surface of her skin; Bucky’s thumbs, on her ribcage, press hard enough to ache. When her knees hit the edge of the cot, Steve pushes back, just enough to keep Bucky from toppling them both over, and cups her hands around Bucky’s neck. Under her thumbs, Bucky’s pulse jumps erratically. “ _You’re_ safe,” Steve says. She’s been telling herself that for days, looking at the bruise-dark circles under Bucky’s eyes and saying to herself _strongest gal I know_ and _alive, alive_ and wanting to touch her. 

Steve finds the buttons on Bucky’s jacket, the metal cool against her fingertips, and slips them through the buttonholes. It’s the uniform Bucky got when she enlisted, olive wool and broad lapels, the one she’d shown Steve the night before she left for Basic. Steve had dreamed about it, about Bucky’s shoulders broad and firm, and in more terror-filled nights, about crimson red staining its breast. She pushes it off Bucky’s shoulders then fumbles at her tie, tugging it loose. Bucky’s hands convulse on her hips, and she thinks she might sob at that trembling touch. 

Below her collar, Bucky’s chest is mottled with jaundicing bruises. It’s not unfamiliar, but — Steve clutches at the placket of Bucky’s shirt, open halfway down her sternum. “You’re safe,” she murmurs, pressing her mouth to the hollow of Bucky’s throat. Bucky’s swallow bobs against her lips, and _alive, alive,_ she thinks. Yanking at the tails of her shirt, Steve pulls it out from the waistband of her trousers, getting the rest of the buttons undone. Her undershirt is dingy and in the low light the shallow rise of her breasts is just a shadow.

“Can I —” Steve says, bringing her hands up to the flat of Bucky’s ribcage. Bucky looks at her, startled, biting at her lower lip, and Steve wants, so badly, to touch her everywhere. Rolling the pads of her fingertips across Bucky’s nipple, she feels the way it hardens to the touch, feels Bucky’s breathless gasp. Pulling the hem of her undershirt up, Steve tugs it over Bucky’s head, drops it to the floor. 

“Not all that pretty, is it?” Bucky says, awkwardly. She holds her hands out, just as Steve had done, as if forcing Steve to look. Her ribs are shadowed with bruises, and there’s a new, pink-puckered scar running crossways over one side of her waist, and scaly patches of angry red skin above the rise of each hipbone. Her wrists are darkened with new scabs, and swollen. She’s thicker than she was when she left, muscles fleshed out in her shoulders and arms, but there’s still a slackness to the skin across her belly after weeks without enough nutrition. Steve flutters the pads of her thumbs over the rough skin, settles her hands at Bucky’s waist.

Steve shakes her head, leans in to kiss Bucky’s collarbone. “You’re the most beautiful thing,” she says. It’s what she’s always thought, forever: Bucky’s not pretty, not at all, but she’s radiant. Beautiful. Here, in front of Steve, alive and trembling under her hands, and beautiful.

Bucky snorts, and says, “Sure, punk,” and nuzzles her chin against Steve’s tucked-down head. Sighs, heavily. Her hands, on the rayon of Steve’s slip, clutch then loosen as Steve lowers her head further, kisses the top of Bucky’s breast. Her hands are at the front fly of Bucky’s trousers when Bucky steps back. 

“You don’t gotta —” Bucky says. Her hands flex on empty air; Steve’s skin is cold without her. “This doesn’t have to —”

“I want to,” Steve says, shifting forward. Surely she’s already made her want known? “I know we haven’t before, but —” She swallows. Bucky’s eyes are on her mouth. “I want to.” She shifts the top button out of its buttonhole, feels the way Bucky’s shallow breaths flutter her stomach up against Steve’s knuckles. Bucky stands stock-still as Steve unfastens the rest, as she drags the waistband over Bucky’s hips, as she falters at the drab cotton of Bucky’s shorts. 

“You don’t gotta,” Bucky says again, voice a little broken.

Steve loosens her hands. “Do you want me to?” She wants to strip Bucky bare, to spread her open, to see all of her. She wants to touch her and not hold back, to feel their bodies tight together and not count the seconds until she needs to pull away.

Bucky takes a breath, ragged and wet, and says, “Yes,” like she’s forcing it out. She drags her eyes to Steve’s. “I want — I —” 

“ _Tell_ me,” Steve says. She can’t dare hope that Bucky wants the way she does, aching and eternal, but if she will just let Steve touch — just let her — 

“Kiss me,” Bucky says, tilting her mouth to Steve’s. “I only —” She cuts herself off, shoves forward to Steve’s mouth. The edge of her teeth cuts sharply against Steve’s lip. Steve grabs at Bucky’s hip, pulls them tight together, kisses back sloppily. Bucky crowds her, pushing them both toward the cot again; when it hits the back of Steve’s knees this time, she fumbles for Bucky’s wrist, keeping her close, and lets herself fall.

When their mouths part, she feels wrenched away, bereft. She pulls on Bucky’s wrist, until Bucky stands between her spread knees, looking down at Steve with eyes wide and dark. With her free hand, Bucky touches her mouth, like it’s a surprise, like it’s a wonder. 

Bringing her hand to Bucky’s waist, Steve thumbs at the side tie of her undershorts. Bucky drops her chin; Steve tugs at the end of one tie. 

“You unbutton the front, you heathen,” Bucky mutters. 

Steve moves her hand to the front yoke, tugs open the top button, then the second. “Don’t often get the opportunity,” she quips back. Bucky laughs, a little hollowly, but shuts up quick as Steve gets the last one open. The fly parts, revealing the dark thatch of Bucky’s pubic hair; Steve drags her fingertips down, feeling the rough spring beneath them. Her own breath catches with Bucky’s. 

“You’re still dressed,” Bucky says, just as Steve moves her hands to push Bucky’s shorts off. “I want — can I see you?” Her voice, hesitant and low, lodges in Steve’s gut. 

“Yeah,” Steve says. “Yeah —” She doesn’t want to take her hands away from Bucky, but Bucky doesn’t move, so she has to, shifts back enough to unbutton her skirt and shimmy it off her hips, to tug her slip up over her head. Brassiere, garter, stockings: Bucky barely shifts as Steve wriggles out of each, watching her with eyes so attentive Steve has to look down. 

“There,” Steve says, finally, leaning back a little. 

Bucky looks: her eyes rake over Steve’s body, from the span of her shoulders to her chest, down to the ridged muscles of her stomach. “ _Hell_ , Steve,” she breathes out, and Steve thinks, traitorously, that even if they change their minds and send her home tomorrow, it will all have been worth it, the serum and the year on stage and the thwarted plans at soldiering, to see Bucky stare down at her new body like it’s something marvelous. She leans back a little more, spreads her knees, puts herself on show. It should feel foolish, but Bucky lets out a cracked little sound and touches one hand to Steve’s shoulder, thumb against her neck, and instead of falling to pieces, Steve feels like a part of her slots into place. 

“Please,” she says. “I want — I’ve wanted —” and Bucky makes that sound again and brings her mouth to Steve’s temple, to her cheekbone, clutches Steve’s shoulder hard. 

“You beauty,” Bucky says, to the corner of Steve’s mouth. Steve whimpers against her, and tugs at her wrist, and pulls her to fall on the cot. Bucky’s knee wedges between Steve’s thigh and the wall, trousers slipping down her hips, and she catches herself on one hand just before their foreheads knock together. Her little huff of laughter skims across Steve’s mouth, and Steve surges up to bring their lips together. 

“Take these _off_ ,” she says, insistently. Bucky gapes at her, then shakes her head and pulls back. She has to stand to untie her boots and kick them off, so she’s facing away from Steve as she slides her trousers and undershorts off, finally, the slim rise of her buttocks and the corded tautness of her thighs pale. Steve elbows up, reaches, touches her bare hip; when Bucky half-turns and looks at her, her expression is agitated for one long, shocking moment, before it clears and she smiles down at Steve.

Before Bucky can angle herself back on the cot, Steve lifts her hips and shimmies out of her panties, letting her thighs fall open so Bucky can kneel between them. Bucky, though, stares at her, shocked. A flush rises on Steve’s skin, hot and pink, but she wants Bucky to look at her like that forever, so she spreads her knees a little more, brings one hand down to pet at her pubic hair. It works; Bucky drops down to the cot again, one leg thrown over Steve’s thigh and hands bracketing her head, and kisses her so hard Steve can feel the sharpness of her teeth. She opens her mouth, wanting Bucky inside her; Bucky’s tongue slides over the tender inner side of her bottom lip. 

Bucky shifts forward, her thigh pressing against Steve’s cunt, sending hot, jolting shocks all up her torso. Wriggling against her, Steve grips at Bucky’s hips, kisses into her mouth, urges her closer with the heel of her foot against the back of Bucky’s thigh. “ _Steve_ ,” Bucky says against her mouth, like she’s surprised; Steve pushes one hand between them to pet at Bucky’s pubic hair, and Bucky says her name again, on an astounded exhale. Her hair is sticky against Steve’s searching fingertips, and her lips part to wetness, slippery and hot. 

“Oh — _oh_ —” Bucky’s barely kissing her now, just holding her mouth open against Steve’s and breathing the same air and crying out against her with each searching touch of Steve’s fingers. Steve’s thankful that she’s done this before, because she feels lost in the slick heat under her fingers, in the rough scratch of Bucky’s pubic hair against her knuckles, in the soft furrows that unfurl beneath her touch, but she wants to bring Bucky off, to feel her shake.

So she draws her fingers upwards, finds where Bucky’s hard and swollen for her, lets her touch go gentle and slow, and Bucky trembles, panting into Steve’s mouth. She circles her fingertips, pressing a little harder, and Bucky thrusts her hips forward, thigh shoving against Steve’s sex and sending her touch skittering for one long moment. “Steve,” Bucky says, “Stevie, god,” like she’s still surprised to be there, and then “oh,” and then “yes,” and then her head drops to the pillow and her mouth comes down hard on Steve’s neck, teeth grazing and then biting as she jerks her hips into Steve’s hand. 

“C’mon, darling, come on,” Steve says, petting down Bucky’s side until her jerking slows and her hips go slack against Steve’s hand. Letting her hand fall, Steve turns her head, kisses Bucky’s ear, her temple. Bucky draws back enough to look at her, eyes heavy and mouth red. Her gaze drags down Steve’s face — Steve can feel it like a caress — and falls to her neck.

“Oh, god, Steve — I’m sorry —” Steve reaches her hand up, touches her neck at the spot where Bucky’s mouth had been, where her eyes are now. It’s wet, a little tender.

“It’ll fade,” she says. Dolores’s always had. Bucky’s eyes track the way Steve touches the mark, and for one long moment, Steve wishes it wouldn’t, wishes Bucky could suck a mark on her that would stay, would remind her all the next day of Bucky’s mouth and teeth and touch.

“Huh,” Bucky says, looking at her neck. It might already be fading away, Steve imagines; anything on the surface like that tends to vanish startlingly quickly. Steve squirms a little under her gaze, and Bucky, startled, grins at her and drops her mouth back down to Steve’s neck, sucking harder this time, hard enough that Steve gasps and grapples at Bucky’s side and rocks up into her. Bucky pulls back, licking her mouth with a satisfied little smack.

“Touch me,” Steve says, “Please, c’mon, Buck.” Bucky’s eyes skitter over to hers, searching Steve’s face. Steve wriggles her hips, rubbing herself against Bucky’s thigh, and opens her mouth under Bucky’s gaze. Lifting one hand, Bucky drags her thumb over Steve’s mouth, letting it drop against her tongue and snag on her teeth; Steve closes her mouth and sucks, feeling the roughness of Bucky’s thumbprint with the flat of her tongue. When Bucky pulls it away, saliva trails over Steve’s chin, leaving a streak down her throat in the trail of Bucky’s hand finding its way to Steve’s chest.

“ _Stevie_ ,” Bucky says, cupping one breast and sliding her slick thumb over Steve’s nipple. Steve flushes up even more; there wasn’t much there before, just a soft little mound, but now her breast fills up Bucky’s palm, spilling plumply against the grip of her fingertips. Bucky seems happy enough with them, dropping her mouth to suck at one nipple until Steve squirms against her, the heat of Bucky’s mouth spreading through her abdomen down to her core. 

Too soon, Bucky draws away, then edges backward until she’s kneeling over Steve’s calf, elbows on the cot between Steve’s spread thighs, and Steve realizes what she’s going to do just as Bucky nuzzles a kiss in the crease of her thigh. “Oh,” she says, as Bucky spreads her open with her thumbs, and then again, “ _oh_ ,” as Bucky grazes her tongue right down the center of her, licking at her as Steve’s hips jerk. Steve spreads her legs wider, wants Bucky up inside her; she pets at Bucky’s hair, her ear, the bit of her cheekbone that Steve can reach. 

Bucky’s mouth is searching, hungry, nothing at all like the playful, slow licks Dolores had given her. Sliding her hands under Steve’s thighs, Bucky lifts her hips up, pulling her closer to her mouth, and Steve’s hand twists in Bucky’s hair, Brylcreemed strands sticky between her fingers. She licks deep into Steve, nose nudging against her pubic bone, then drags her tongue up.

“There — _there_ —” Steve groans, and Bucky’s hum thrums through her whole body. She’s close, so close, tension building inside her, coiled tight in her gut, and Bucky follows as she cants her hips up higher, feet scrabbling against the cot and one hand gripping her blanket tight, and then Bucky’s gaze flicks up to hers, eyes meeting over the expanse of Steve’s drawn-tight body, and Steve bites down on her cry as she bursts open, shattering.

Bucky doesn’t draw back until Steve falls slack and open, thighs twitching and hand slipping loose from Bucky’s hair. She leans back, still up on her elbows, and pets at Steve’s inner thighs. Steve should feel shy, Bucky’s eyes on her where she’s spread and swollen, but instead she strokes Bucky’s cheek, her soaking mouth and her slick chin, and then tugs at her hand until Bucky ambles up to lie down, half on top of Steve and wedged against the wall. 

When Steve’s mouth finds Bucky’s, she tastes herself on her lips, slick and sour and warm. Bucky groans at Steve’s searching tongue, pets at her belly, holds her in place with one narrow thigh slung across her hips. 

She wants to say something, wants to say how long she’s wanted that, wants to say how glad she is that Bucky’s here, safe, wants to say that she’s happy Bucky wants her in this new body. It’s all true, except the last, which is and isn’t. Watching Bucky’s fingertips trail up and down the smooth muscles of Steve’s belly, Steve wishes, for one stinging moment, that it was the concave hollow of her old body, that Bucky’s inquisitive, avid touches had fallen, first, on the sharp ridges of her cupped hipbones, the striated expanse of her ribcage, the drawn-tight bow of her collarbone. Instead, Bucky’s hand traces the new curves of her body like she’s mapping her out. 

Perhaps Bucky senses something in the way Steve holds her body; perhaps she feels crowded pressed between Steve and the wall; perhaps she’s panicking a little, the way Steve’s ignoring the nervous flutter of her own heartbeat. Regardless, Bucky stills her hand, spreads it out on Steve’s abdomen like she’s taking one final touch, and draws herself away from Steve a hair’s breadth. 

“I need to go,” Bucky says; Steve hopes the little cant in her voice is regret at the necessity. She does: the men might not be sober enough to miss her right now, but they will notice if she doesn’t wake up in the barracks. Still, Steve huffs unhappily and wriggles against her. Bucky inhales, the rise of her chest pressing against Steve’s arm, and holds it for a moment before letting it out in a sigh and sitting up. She doesn’t look at Steve as she awkwardly rolls off the cot and starts to gather her clothes. 

“Bucky —” Steve says, uncertain. Bucky looks over her shoulder, smiles tightly. 

“Sleep, Steve,” she says. “We’ve got a lot of work ahead of us.” Before she leaves, she steps back to the cot, where Steve has swung her legs over the edge and sits, watching her dress, and cups her hand around Steve’s neck. She opens her mouth, like she might say something; doesn’t. Her hand lingers for one long moment before she pulls away; it leaves behind a chill. Bucky doesn’t look back before she closes the door.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hey-o, finally we reach the point in the story where it earns both its rating and its pairing tag at once! Thanks for being patient; I hope you're all still with me!


	10. Chapter 10

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> “If you’re going to be part of this team, you follow my orders,” she says, quiet and a little slow, careful. “And my orders will never be to protect me over the completion of the mission. The missions come first.” She pauses, takes a breath, looks at each of them in turn. “If you got a problem sticking to that, now’s the time to figure it out.” _And leave_ , she doesn’t say, and Bucky is glad. Steve’s asking them to swear something here that Bucky’s never going to be able to promise.

_December 1943, south of Namur, Belgium_

To Bucky’s left, a small bird lands on a branch. She gives it a flicker of a glance, keeping her eyes forward. A sparrow, maybe, she thinks, but then she doesn’t know much about birds beyond pigeons and gulls. It’s small, anyway, and brown, and one of the few living things she’s seen yet this morning besides herself and, in the narrow aperture of her scope, the guards manning the front of the Hydra base. The branch bobs in her peripheral vision as the bird jumps a little closer. Down the hill, one guard looks at his watch, bored, and says something to the other. Bucky knows how they feel; she’s been settled in for two hours now — a little over-cautious, but it’s their first mission out all together — and she’s really very ready for their shift change to happen so Steve and the guys can show up. 

The sky brightens. No real sun yet, just the dark slowly lifting away. The ground below her belly is frozen. She burrows her fingertips into her mittens and doesn’t think about complaining to Lee about the cold. The space next to her shoulder is empty, after all. Then again, she’s not really that cold.

Steve had wondered about Bucky out on her own. In the few days between returning to camp and shipping up to England for training, the team had sat down to hash through the mish-mash of skills they bring to the table. There were experts, of course, once they got to base in Little Staughton, who analyzed their every shot and move and prodded at them to do better, but Bucky figures obstacle courses don’t always bring out the most useful hidden talents. The team does cover a lot, as it turns out: communications, explosives, espionage, airborne training, sniping, and a healthy helping of sheer brute strength. 

“You’re a marksman now,” Steve said to Bucky, looking at her like she was almost shy. “Will one of them work for your spotter, or will we find one more person?”

Bucky remembers her breath going wild and choking in her throat, remembers swallowing it down, remembers forcing herself to not think about Lee’s head bursting into bloody gore next to her. She said no, said, “I’ll go solo,” to Steve’s skeptical glance. “It’s how the Reds do it.” If Lyudmila Pavlichenko can do it and then make best friends with the First Lady, then Bucky can do alright on her own.

Steve still doesn’t like it, Bucky hieing off by herself hours before the rest, to sit still behind tree cover at the crest of a hill without anyone covering her. It’s her job, though, a set of skills her body has given her that mean she’s the best choice they have to lie, unmoving and unseen, and watch three guards mill around and yawn. Goddamn, they are boring. 

The building they guard is just a gatehouse: small, square, solidly built. To its left, an ante-building that houses supplies, and to its right a truck garage. Behind it, however, a long, lean rectangular building lurks, two broad locked doors facing front and, hidden from Bucky’s view, a line of truck bays. Intelligence suggests that it houses a factory not unlike the weapons facility where Bucky and the men had been forced to work: smaller, with a greater emphasis on common artillery, the SSR thinks, but close enough that their expertise in the workings and weaknesses of the machinery might, in fact, make them the best team for the job.

The bird hops a little closer, chirps. The sky above her is lighter now, but grey and heavy with unshed snow; she hopes it will hold out until they’re finished. Snowflakes on the back of your neck when you’re waiting in a blind are deeply unpleasant. She watches one of the guards kick at the dirt, like a bored child. These ones aren’t wearing the same black beetle-suits as those at the weapons factory, for which she is thankful. She can just make out their faces through her scope, sees the shadow of a scowl one gives after looking at his watch, sees the twitch of another’s mustache, dark and over-groomed, when he yells something across the yard. It should be nearly time. 

The radio on her hip remains silent — a good sign, in this case, as Steve knows not to signal unless they’re aborting the mission. She glances at her watch, then swings the barrel of her gun ten degrees to the south. In the underbrush, halfway between Bucky and the gates to the compound, the team creeps slowly closer. When she tips the gun scope back to the guards, one of them is gesturing to the others, tilting his head toward the door. Shift change.

Bucky pulls the antenna of her radio transceiver out. She doesn’t say anything, just taps out - - . , - - - against the mouthpiece and waits. GO. She gets back - - - , - . - and gets ready to fire.

Steve goes in first. Bucky thinks she’s about to have a whole war of watching Steve run headlong into danger ahead of the team, but then, she’s watched the same for most of a lifetime. Steve up and barrels right through the locked gate, just shoves her Stark-made shield in front of her and runs, bursting it open with her shoulder, and Bucky picks off the first guard right at that moment, just to up the confusion. Then she shifts her gaze to the top of the building, scanning the roof for reinforcements, and grins as she sees a rooftop door open. She gets the first three one after another; they fall into each other like dominoes before the fourth soldier yanks the door halfway closed on the pile of bodies. A stray bullet sent that way, now and then, will keep them there, so Bucky searches the flanks of the building, watching for more panicked men. 

The real guard will come out before long, she knows, soldiers armed with the guns she made them, maybe even tanks with the shells she rolled; this is just the graveyard shift. They’re scattered, haphazard, because it is true that the element of surprise sometimes works, and a blonde woman carrying a giant dinner plate bursting through steel-reinforced gates generally counts as a surprise. But: Bucky can hear the slam of a metal door clanging open, and when she pulls her scope to look north-north-east, she sees a squad of black-helmeted soldiers bursting out of the barracks building. A shiver runs through her, but her hands are steady.

“Incoming, two o’clock,” she says to her radio, and gets back Jim’s “Roger.” She can just see him running to the corner of the main building, handy-talkie held up to his mouth with one hand and his M3 lifted in the other. 

She swings the scope back to the front courtyard in time to see Steve shout something at Monty, who stands stock-still with blood dripping from his knife. A dead guard spills across the ground between them. Whatever she shouts is snatched away by the wind, but Bucky need only the barest shadows of her brows to know that she’s angry. Monty shouldn’t be there; according to the plan, he should already be in the garage, setting explosives with Jacques. Steve jerks one hand at him, and he lopes off. 

Jim starts shooting around the corner of the factory just as Steve skitters to a stop next to him, flinging the shield out with one hand. It collides with the first row of soldiers, knocking two of them back bodily before falling to the ground. Bucky knows before Steve moves that she’ll go after it; she’s been playing with the damned thing for days, all through their training, far more attention than she’d given to her gun. It drove Bucky spare, because it’s a real war and Steve needs a real weapon; when she told Steve as much, Steve had only shrugged.

“I’m carrying the gun, too, aren’t I?” she’d said, like it sat comfortably on her hip instead of uneasily, like she wasn’t spending half her time studying up on how to use the shield to incapacitate, not kill. Like Bucky doesn’t know that. “Besides, I’ve got the best shot in the Army watching over me, so they say.” She says things like that, now, if no one’s around, things that have intent behind them, not just teasing banter. The curl of her mouth when she does sends tremors through Bucky’s core, and she never quite knows how to meet Steve’s eye. 

Thing is, it’s true: Bucky’s with her, until she’s too dead to pull a fucking trigger, so Steve does have a gun. The best shot in the Army, Bucky’s not so sure, but she’s only got to be better than whomever they’re up against. Today, yes, she is — a satisfying relief, that her hands haven’t forgotten everything they learned before the factory. 

In the curl of her sight, Steve dives around the corner of the building, skidding on one knee right into the flank of soldiers. She’s too close to shoot, but she slams a fist into the kneecap of the guy to her left, then scrambles for the shield, kicking one foot out to take out another. She’s effective; they fall, out of commission, but it’s not clean and final in the way Bucky’s learned war sometimes needs to be. Steve’s still learning that. Bucky aims above her head and starts picking off the second row, anyone Jim’s not able to hit. 

There are times, as a sniper, when Bucky’s up on a hill, or in a tree, or crouched on the top of a building, and it feels like she’s just an audience, like all she can do is look down and watch while the men below her fall. Those are the times that linger in her nightmares. But there are other times when she’s up there and the air feels sharp and clear, the world narrows down to the circle of her scope, and she knows she’s up there because it’s her, it’s her gun and her bullet, that matters. Right now, she sets her shoulders and looks down the barrel of her gun to frame the rows of black-helmeted soldiers and aims for their necks, above where their armor ends, and doesn’t feel anything as she watches them fall.

If they’d sent her to a proper medic after Steve’s rescue, they might have asked. She knows other fellas in the 107th who shook their heads at questions about confusion, fear, about why they’re over there, more worried about the uncertain consequences of a battle fatigue diagnosis than the thoughts in their heads. But Stark had been a lot more concerned with what she remembered of Zola’s equipment and handling of her body than the things that lurk in her mind at night, than the hushed composure that overtakes her mind when she holds a gun in her hands. It’s not that new, she doesn’t think, but she can’t quite remember. Algeria seems a very long way away, now.

In front of the factory, Steve falls back, shield held aloft, bullets glancing off its surface, and tucks herself back in the corner with Jim, held close together so the both of them can fire over the top edge of the shield. The soldiers keep coming, and coming, splitting off to attempt to flank the little stronghold Steve and Jim have developed, backed up by Bucky’s gun, and Bucky’s still listening for her radio to go with Jacques’s warning. Any time now — 

Instead, from the supply building nearest Bucky, a door slams open as Dum Dum barrels out, tripping over his own feet and nearly falling, right in the path of the helmeted soldiers. He was supposed to come out the side door, goddamn it, and Bucky sees Steve realize his mistake, attention drawn away from the soldiers. Through the narrow ring of her scope, Bucky sees it happen like it’s been slowed down, Dum Dum’s stumble and the way a dozen gleaming black heads jerk in unison toward him. One of them gets off a shot before Bucky can, and Dum Dum stumbles back and then throws himself to the side, to where Steve and Jim are tucked behind the narrow protection offered by the corner of the building. 

Bucky shoots. A line of soldiers go down. 

In the pause while Bucky reloads, she sees Steve turn and look at her. Straight at her, like she’s a yard away and not hundreds. She makes a gesture, lifts the shield, and moves. They’ve practiced a good handful of these signals; secretly Bucky thinks of this one as _Steve does something bull-headed stupid_ , but Steve insists it’s just _cover me._ Bucky does: Steve runs right at the soldiers, shield up, and shoves aside the first couple like bowling pins while Bucky fires on the opposite flank. It doesn’t last long; they’re trained, and they rotate and converge on Steve, who whirls in the middle like a top, striking out with shield and fists, and Bucky’s ready to drop her gun and run down the hill and jump into the fray, her fists itching and bile up in her throat, when her handy-talkie screeches. 

“Fire in the hole, chaps,” Monty says, crisp consonants garbled by the static, and then the ground underneath her trembles. She ducks her head, pure instinct, even though she’s well out of the way of the bomb blast. 

“Shit,” she says, to no one.

“About goddamn time,” Jim gripes over the radio. The sound of Monty’s returning laughter is broken, staticky, and horrifyingly welcome. As the smoke settles, she can see two figures dart from the cratered-out garage into the factory. 

“My apologies,” Monty says, sounding out of breath. Steve is really going to talk to them about how the handy-talkies aren’t for chatter, Bucky can just about bet. “We’ll have the next one set in a jiffy.” They’d better, Bucky thinks, because while the first explosion knocked a couple of soldiers over, left the rest looking a little dazed, they’re rapidly recouping. Jacques’s second target is the massive, hulking factory in the center of the compound that Bucky knows is full up of the same sorts of machines she’d worked on for the long weeks in the Alps. 

She envies him a little, getting to place the explosives that will send the whole thing to pieces. This compound is smaller, and they seem to bring the workers in from a nearby town rather than using prisoners — it’s early enough that shifts haven’t started — but Bucky feels a grim, bone-deep satisfaction at the prospect of those too-familiar machines collapsing into crumpled ruins. 

They’re taking their time getting it done, though: another column of soldiers advances from around the far side of the factory building, and Dum Dum throws himself across the gap between buildings and behind a crumpled steel door. The gaps in the blasted bricks still smoke, a little. Propping his Winchester up on the edge of the door, he starts to shoot at the new line of soldiers.

Even though they’ve got the same steely black helmets as the soldiers at the compound, these men are equipped with run-of-the-mill sidearms rather than the sort of bulky ray-guns Bucky and the men had brought back to Howard Stark to study. Right now, she wouldn’t mind one of them herself, something that could blow a man halfway to hell in one shot, but Stark hasn’t yet reverse-engineered their power source. She’s not complaining too hard, because he did make some pretty little upgrades to the neat Springfield in her hands. Not to mention forged the shield Steve is currently using to deflect bullets. That’s going to scratch the paint job, Bucky thinks, as she takes out a few of the soldiers on Dum Dum’s side. After some back-and-forth, Bucky and Peggy combined had convinced Stark to smack a star right in the center, a dull gunmetal grey to match the one on the back of Steve’s suit. Bucky had razzed her about seeing if she could find some battlefield-appropriate sequins when they sat down with Peggy’s tailor to cobble together some field wear, but hadn’t said a single word when Steve shyly suggested that the star motif from her spangled boiler suit carry over. They’re not cleared to wear official Army uniforms, not in their squad’s designated-unofficial capacity, but there’s no reason their enemies shouldn’t know that their beatings come courtesy of the Allies.

Down below, Dum Dum tosses a grenade into the line of soldiers, who scatter enough to mostly avoid the blow but leave themselves open to Dum Dum’s Winchester finding the less-protected soft spots at their backs. There are too many of them, though, and even with Bucky backing up Dum Dum’s fire, they regroup and charge him, firing on the crumpled steel door until he has to roll to one side, back up against the paltry cover of the blasted-out wall. As if that weren’t enough, cresting over the rise in the long distance comes a tank, long gun barrel already swinging around for a target.

Bucky’s about to grab her radio, yell at Jacques and Monty to pick up the pace, when she sees them fall out of the side door, tripping and stumbling, and Monty says over the radio, “Fall _back_ —” 

There’s no _back_ for Dum Dum to fall to; instead he heaves himself to his feet and charges bodily toward the soldiers advancing toward him, startling them enough that he makes it around to the cover of the gatehouse before they start firing. On the other end of the factory, Jim and Steve both run backwards, firing as they make their way to the gatehouse, too. Before they can reach it, the first explosion hits, an uncertain rumble that blasts into a fireball, blowing the doors outwards and off their hinges. Steve just manages to grab Jim and tuck them behind the shield as the second charge goes, then the third, a chain effect running down the length of the factory building. 

The smoke and rubble obscures them from Bucky’s sight for a too-long moment, and she keeps her sight trained on the place where Steve and Jim had been, willing her pulse to steady from its wild fluttering. She might not breathe; she doesn’t know. As the haze clears, Steve’s shield appears first, gunmetal grey star thrusting forward through the smoke, followed by two pairs of legs as Steve holds Jim close to her and covers them.

Bucky only stays long enough to count all five of her teammates on the safe side of the gatehouse, running — limping, in Dum Dum’s case — toward the gate and their rendezvous point before she pulls back, shoving her rifle with less care than she should into its holster and picking herself up off the ground.

A final, delayed charge hits as she’s rounding over the peak of the hill, and under her breath she curses Jacques. He can blow anything up, but it appears they hadn’t quite worked out the timing problems in his fuses during training. 

Her path to the rendezvous point is thick with trees, and she dodges through them at a run, relishing the whip of thin branches against her arms and the pump of blood through her moving muscles after so long in place. At the far edge of the hill, a steep incline leads down into a narrow copse, hidden from both the compound and the nearby road, where they’ve agreed to meet. From the edge of the precipice, she can just glimpse them making their way to the clearing, their movements visible in the gentle wave of disturbed fauna. Bracing herself in a low, leaning crouch, Bucky starts to work her way down the hill, gun slung diagonally across her back so it won’t jar against the ground.

They’ve assembled by the time Bucky’s near the bottom. She skitters the last couple of yards down the incline, stumbling to a stop in the clearing next to Steve. “Well, that went —” she starts, then looks around the group and stops. 

Steve is spitting mad, just livid; Bucky can tell by the way she grits her teeth down hard and paces like she’s drawn herself in, coiled tight. They’re all panting a little, except for Steve. Bucky catches a wary glimpse passing between Monty and Jim. After a long moment, Steve draws herself up, pulls her shoulders back, goes still. “That was a sorry mess,” Steve says.

“Hey, we all got out,” Dum Dum answers, hands on his knees. Bucky thinks he might be hiding a grimace.

“You got shot,” she says, half in loyalty to Steve and half because there’s still a part of her that’s seeing the way he jerked and fell.

“Well —” Dum Dum says, before Jim interrupts with — “You were supposed to come out the goddamn side door.”

“I like to make an entrance,” Dum Dum says, straightening up. His grin is pasted on, rigid. 

“You mean you ignored the plan,” Steve says. Dum Dum opens his mouth, then snaps it closed. 

“It was just an honest —” Monty starts. Steve turns, glares hard at him.

“An honest mistake? Like you _completely_ ignoring my orders to go with Dernier?” 

“I —” Monty says, then seems to think better of it. Steve’s hands are clenched at her sides, a gesture Bucky knows deep in her own body; Steve’s too careful, now, with her new body, to let this come to blows, but Bucky still takes a step closer to her. Giving her the smallest glance, Steve takes a breath, loosens her fists.

“If you’re going to be part of this team, you follow my orders,” she says, quiet and a little slow, careful. “And my orders will never be to protect me over the completion of the mission. The missions come first.” She pauses, takes a breath, looks at each of them in turn. “If you got a problem sticking to that, now’s the time to figure it out.” _And leave_ , she doesn’t say, and Bucky is glad. Steve’s asking them to swear something here that Bucky’s never going to be able to promise. 

“Steve —” Monty starts to say, and Steve cuts him off with just a look.

“I’m not saying I’ll never need your help,” Steve says, a little gentler now. “Or that I’m not happy to know you all have my back — like I’ve got yours. I’m just saying that what we’re doing here, these missions we’re on, they’re bigger than my life. Bigger than all of our lives, they have to be. And I can’t take you with me if you don’t believe that, too.”

A long pause. Bucky wants to say something, thinks — goddamn, she’s Steve’s second-in-command. And it wasn’t her hand that slashed the neck of that soldier. But one day it will be, she figures: one day she’ll be the one disobeying Steve’s orders. She wants to say something, but — 

“Yes, ma’am, Captain,” Dum Dum says, finally, tilting his chin at her. He’s somber now, restrained, and Bucky can see the way Steve’s eyes flare a little wide at the title. She’s been _Agent_ , mostly, or Rogers, or a fairly awkward _um, ma’am_ up until now. At this moment, _Captain_ feels right, SSR protocol be damned. 

“I apologize, Captain. It won’t happen again,” Monty says, and Steve nods, equanimous, and then the rest of them, too, chime in with their own assent. When her gaze falls on Bucky, she holds it until Bucky nods, silently. It’ll have to do; Steve has to know everything she’s not saying. The little huddle is quieter now, more somber, and Steve lets them abide in it for a long moment, a thoughtful pause stretched out. That’s the thing, Bucky thinks: Steve has always been a leader, she’s just never had anyone but Bucky to follow her around.

They’ve got a couple hours walking ahead of them before they make it to the ersatz airstrip where they’ll meet the extraction team, and then the rest of the day to wait until nightfall so the plane can actually land. First, though, they’ve got to get the hell out of there, and that means making sure everyone is fit to travel. Bucky unstraps her first aid kit from its pouch on her hip and jerks her head at Dum Dum. “Let’s see that gunshot, Sergeant,” she says, and Dum Dum only hesitates a moment before stepping closer, carefully and a little cowed. 

The bullet gouged a chunk out of his thigh, leaving a ragged tear in his trousers and a messy glut of clotting blood, but it’s not too deep. Bucky cleans it up, raising one eyebrow when he curses at the sting of the sulfa powder, and slaps a dressing on it, securing it in place with a gauze bandage tied around his thigh. 

Jim has a gash in his calf that he rinses with water and declares a scratch, and Jacques’s burned his left forearm a little. They’re all sweaty and streaked with dirt, but alive. 

++

“This is never going to work.” Steve shoves loose strands of her hair back away from her face as she paces, slapping her hand against a tree. Her cheeks are flushed. They have three hours to wait until nightfall, and Steve’s been silent and stewing most of the walk to the airstrip. Bucky pulled her away from the group as much to let her shout as to get a moment to breathe, herself. The air around them flutters with stray snowflakes, and Bucky can just see her breath when she exhales. The skittish edges of fear she’d felt at the end of the mission spread and dissipated during the walk, which had been punctuated by tight smiles and bored yawns and an awful lot of mud.

“Aw, c’mon, we just need practice.” Bucky leans against a tree trunk, crossing her arms over her chest. 

“We’ve had two weeks of practice, and the first time we’re out in the field —”

“Steve.” Bucky reaches out, smacking Steve’s elbow as she walks by. Steve stops pacing, takes a heaving breath. “This isn’t the same as training on a base in England, and you know that.” No one shot at them in Little Staughton, except Agent Carter when she had a yen to put them through their paces, and she’s too good a shot to actually hit them.

Steve’s shoulders drop, and for the flash of a moment, she’s bony and thin again, all the tension of holding herself in the world only falling away when she’s at home.

“Yeah,” she says, “of course.”

“They do respect you,” Bucky says. _Captain_ , she doesn’t say. No reason to get Steve’s head too big. “That’s a start.” Steve nods, though she doesn’t really look convinced. “They’re just not used to fighting alongside —”

“Girls?” Steve says, eyebrow raised.

“Super soldiers,” Bucky says. “Punk.”

A hint of a smirk creeps up the corner of Steve’s mouth. She looks down at the ground, practically scuffing her feet in the dirt. “Don’t see why it should make a difference,” she says. “I’m here to do the job, same as all of you.”

“Still as stupid as ever,” Bucky says, an indulgent smile spreading as Steve looks up, frowning. “Steve, what you can do, it’s incredible. All this —” she gestures down the length of Steve’s body — “If I believed in miracles —”

Steve’s flushed properly now, pink high up on her cheeks and her teeth worrying at her lower lip. “Yeah?” she says, her voice canted low like she’s got no worries left, and now it’s Bucky who’s blushing, coughing out a little laugh, because sure, she meant it just like it sounds, in every way: watching Steve move through the long distance of her scope is like something from the pictures, except there are no strings or trickery, and feeling the new hard warmth of her body makes Bucky feel secure in a way she hasn’t since she stepped foot on a steamship and came across the Atlantic, like this good thing might not get pulled away from her. Steve, healthy and safe: a dream she’s been dreaming a long time. She ought to hate her, coming out here and stepping in front of goddamn bullets; does, a little. But Bucky’s anger burns out faster than Steve’s. Right now she thinks she left it behind somewhere in England, in the cracks they left open between them.

Because they haven’t really touched — not _really_ — since that first night. The day after they arrived, a WAAF squadron followed, filling up the barracks rooms around Steve and making it far too tricky for Bucky to slip in again. And besides, she hadn’t really known if Steve wanted to, again, and between the constant drilling and interminable briefings there were scant moments to catch an unobserved conversation. In the sweet safety of training, it had been a continual challenge to avoid keeping her hands on Steve whenever they worked together. 

But now Steve’s looking at her like she just said half of what she’s been thinking this whole time, like she’s let out the fact that those flashes of Steve spread out before her, the lingering slick of Steve’s taste on her mouth, come back to her with distracting regularity. “You like me like this,” Steve says, somewhere between a question and a statement.

“ _Yeah_ ,” Bucky says, affected casualness mostly gone. It’s not hard to let Steve see the way she rakes her eyes over her whole held-taut frame; not hard and the most difficult thing in the world, all at once, to feel like Steve might let Bucky want her. Steve steps a little closer, crowding her against the tree, not touching her anywhere. 

“Like that I could keep you in place, if I wanted? Or that you don’t have to be careful with me?” Her breath is warm on Bucky’s mouth, inches apart. Bucky nods, sharp arousal in her center, and wrenches her eyes up from Steve’s mouth to her eyes.

There’s something a little steely in Steve’s gaze, something that pierces into Bucky’s gut, and she shoves one hand up between them, stops Steve from pressing in closer. “I liked you before, too,” she says, hedging on an instinct born of knowing this woman in front of her for the best part of her life. Her voice sounds straightforward, easy; inside her lungs are burning, her throat tight. Steve doesn’t look annoyed, or disgusted, just surprised, eyebrows flicking upwards. 

“You —”

“It’s not just this body,” Bucky says. “In case you were thinking so.” Steve takes a step back; Bucky wants to chase her, doesn’t, keeps her back pressed hard to the tree trunk. 

“Really?” Steve says, incredulous. “How long?”

_Forever_ , Bucky thinks. “A long time,” she says. “Dunno. Never thought you’d —” She licks her lips. “Never figured you’d be so _stupid_ ,” she says, like it’s a joke, maybe, but she means it: she worked and worked to make sure Steve could have a normal life after they parted ways, after Steve’s youthful anger burned a little slower. She left Steve behind and figured she’d find a fella, a nice 4F with gentle hands and a gentle job, and they’d settle down. Kids, maybe. She could have dealt with it, if she came home, could have been happy for Steve. Safety, that’s all she’s ever wanted for Steve. Safety, and here they are, in an embattled forest in Belgium, and Bucky can’t muster up the wish to send Steve back to Brooklyn, away from her again.

“It doesn’t feel stupid,” Steve says, far too serious, brows brought together with parallel creases above her nose. And that’s all of it, everything Bucky knew somewhere deep underneath all those unsaid plans she was making for Steve: that Steve doesn’t goddamn know _stupid_ when she’s standing right in it, in a goddamn war zone about to do something that could get them both called up in serious trouble for any number of reasons. Steve runs headlong into stupid, and Bucky’s the idiot that thought she’d ever do anything different.

“What’s it feel like, then,” she says, and kicks out one foot to knock at Steve’s ankle.

“You fishing for compliments, Barnes?” Steve says, eyes going softer as she takes a step closer, outside of her calf pressing against Bucky’s still-outstretched boot. Bucky’s slouched down a little, back against the tree and feet kicked out, so Steve’s gaze falls down to sweep over her eyes, her mouth. Steve brings one hand up to lean against the tree trunk, just above Bucky’s shoulder, and with her arms crossed over her chest Bucky feels small, Steve a great broad span above her. Steve’s puffing her chest out a little, and that’s familiar, this silly little tip into a bravado she never used to be able to back up. It doesn’t seem quite so silly now. 

“Nah,” Bucky says, her mouth dry, and then, “Maybe.” She knows what it feels like to her: like her world’s being upended. Like the war had shaken every last penny of hope out of her, and then Steve came along and found something bright and shiny deep inside. Like she’s something to be clung onto, perilously close to slipping away. 

Moving quickly, Steve kisses her. Bucky’s head knocks against the tree; Steve presses harder. Her fingers flex, where she’s now gripping at Bucky’s hips. When she pulls away, it’s with a wet, smacking sound, over the caught exhale of Bucky’s breath.

“It’s like coming up for air,” Steve says, just as Bucky thinks _it’s like diving in_. Her head feels foggy, her hands cold; when she brings them up to grip at Steve’s waist, she can feel the bustling heat of her, the way her body runs hot and fast now. It made for an easy uniform, at least: where Bucky’s picked out wool in a soft navy for her jacket, close-cropped and full of handy pockets, Steve went with an upgraded version of her old boiler suit, kinda like the flyboys wear. It snaps right up the front; Bucky snugs one finger under the edge of the placket, next to the snap up by her collar, and tugs. 

“Bucky —” Steve says, and Bucky puts her mouth on the exposed bit of skin under her collar and says, “What —” and sucks enough to pull a gasp up from Steve’s throat.

“The guys gonna come looking for us?” Steve asks, as Bucky gentles her mouth, kisses the already-fading red mark.

“Nah,” she says, against Steve’s skin. “I told ‘em you took _forever_ to cool off when you’re angry.” She hadn’t, really, just said something like _let me deal with her_ and followed Steve before she could break her own fist against a tree.

“You’re a fucking shit,” Steve says, and knocks Bucky’s mouth out of the way, bites a little at the exposed line of Bucky’s throat to make her point. She’s maybe right: Steve’s anger burns bright, and hot, and quick, and most of the time it simmers down to its usual hot-coal state before long. It’s like tossing a handful of firecrackers on a lit hearth: the heat’s always there, but it takes the right provocation to go ablaze. 

But — “You walked in fucking silence halfway across Belgium,” Bucky says. Steve ducks her head, rolls her shoulders in. 

“Yeah,” she says. “I, uh —”

“You were that mad at them?”

“No!” Steve looks up at her, hard and earnest and embarrassed. “Not at them. At me — I don’t know what the hell I’m doing, Buck, god.” Steve leans away a little, puts space between their shoulders, worries at her mouth as her glance skids to the side.

“You did alright,” Bucky says, petting at her hip a little. She did, really: handled herself well and told them off when they needed telling off and knew where each of her guys was, when they weren’t falling out of the wrong doors or taking ages too long to set explosives. “We just need a little more practice, like I said.”

“Not that,” Steve says, and then, “I mean, that also, but.” She’s embarrassed, red up to her ears and shifting one foot to the other. Bucky wants to smooth the flushed red from her cheeks, wants to make her squirm more. “I don’t know what to say to them,” she says, all in a rush. “They’re — I mean — I’ve never had a lot of friends who were, you know, fellas. Not like they are, anyway.”

Bucky can’t help a little snorting laugh, because of course Steve’s absolutely right. There were plenty of guys who made decent soldiering-types in the slaughterhouse, much fewer at the Art Students League. 

“They’re nice guys,” she says, then amends it, “I mean, they’re decent fellas,” because _nice_ isn’t really quite right. 

“You’re their _friend_ ,” Steve says, long stress on the word, and Bucky bites back the instinct to brush it away. Lee was her friend, she thinks, but even Lee she held at a distance. These guys, they’re under her skin. Itchy. Fucking annoying, if she’s being honest. Something in her stomach hooks, twists. 

“And you’re their captain,” she says, carefully. “But with what we’re doing, I don’t figure that means you can’t be friends, too. Just gotta give it —”

“Yeah, I know, just give it time.”

“Don’t sass me, Rogers,” Bucky says, deadpan, and Steve gives her a half-hearted snarl. “Just — maybe try actually speaking, about something other than the mission.” Steve lets out a deep, hard breath. That’s the thing with Steve: when it comes to most folks, folks who aren’t Bucky and Rebecca and a handful of the folks Steve knows from the League, Ben and Bernarda when she still sees them, when it comes to most folks, Steve only has two settings, awkward and the task at hand. Her small talk is sweet and gentle and has some care behind it, but it’s not easy, not really. “Just talk to them,” she says again. “They’re good people.” 

Steve nods, a little too earnestly, like she’s still thinking it out. “Guess we better get back to them,” she says, and Bucky wants to groan, maybe does a little, because she’d been more than ready for Steve’s mouth on hers, more than ready to see about unbuttoning Steve’s new uniform, then had to go and ruin it her own damn self by being serious. 

“We don’t _gotta_ ,” she says, kissing the square line of Steve’s jaw. Steve obligingly tilts her chin, hums in a lackluster show of disagreement, and then inhales sharply when Bucky tugs the second snap open at the front of her suit, shoving it down a little more to get her fingers on Steve’s tit. 

“Buck —” There’s enough whine to Steve’s voice to tell Bucky that she’s not the only one who’s been thinking about this, about finding some damned time on their own and seeing if they fit together when they’re not both full of gulping relief and anger. She’d wondered, after that first night, staring up at the barracks ceiling not sleeping, if she’d fucked everything up. If Steve would draw away, would want her off the team, would leave her behind. Bracing for it, she’d faced that morning like it was the end of everything she’d ever known; it would be okay, she’d told herself, because Steve didn’t need her anymore. She could take care of herself, now, so it was okay that Bucky had cracked her chest wide open in front of her and shown her every etched-in thought she’d been trying to hide. 

But Steve had met her eye the next morning and promptly gone red as a tomato before slipping in next to her in the mess, letting their shoulders press together a little longer than necessary while she settled. The next two weeks they’d both been elbow-deep in war strategy instruction and mud, alternately, but in the scarce moments they caught together, without the looming presence of either dozens of books to be read or Wing Commander Lewis glaring disapprovingly at the unorthodox team making use of his airbase, Steve would look at Bucky like she was hot for her, mouth bitten like she could consume her. Under that look, Bucky felt like her chest was still flayed wide open.

Now, Bucky gropes at Steve’s breast under layers of fabric — a white undershirt, a camisole, a bra — and swallows up, hungrily, the little groans she makes. She’s not stopping Bucky, not at all: her fingertips flex against Bucky’s hips and she leans into Bucky’s hand like she’s chasing the roll of Bucky’s thumb against her nipple. Her teeth, biting at Bucky’s lower lip, are sharp-edged and and a little too hard to be teasing. Bucky wants to spread her out, to eat her whole, to wrap herself all around her like Steve’s still small and feel every part of their skin pressed hard together.

Instead, standing in a forest with scattered snowflakes melting where they land on her skin, her hair, Bucky shoves forward and turns them around, so that Steve’s the one up against the tree, and starts pulling the rest of the snaps of Steve’s suit open, right down to her thighs. With one hand on Steve’s shoulder, she keeps her pressed up against the tree while she brings the other between Steve’s legs, wasting very little time in pushing the hem of her panties to one side and petting her fingers over the hot, matted tangle of hair. Steve lets out a shuddering sigh at her touch and sags against her, legs falling a little more open to Bucky’s searching fingertips.

Steve’s cunt is slick and hot already; Bucky feels like just a glance from Steve gets her hot and soaking, these days, but she wonders if Steve was always like this, if her desire ran as hot and constant as her temper. “You want this?” she says against Steve’s mouth, because she needs Steve to say it, to tell her.

“Bucky —” Steve says, kisses her harder, “yeah, I want you, I want —” The broken-off edge to her voice slides under Bucky’s skin, into the raw edges of her nerves, makes her knees tremble. 

Steve’s breathing goes jagged as Bucky’s fingers slide up the valleys of her cunt, as she drags one knuckle over the hard ball of Steve’s clit. She clutches at Steve’s neck with her other hand, palm sweaty on the hot throb of Steve’s pulse, on the firm twist of her tendons as she drops her head back, bracing against the tree. 

“You do,” Bucky says, muffled against the folded-back collar of Steve’s suit. It’s a goddamned marvel, she thinks, it’s something beyond hope. When she tilts her hand, Steve opens up for her, soft and tender and hot; Bucky feels consumed. “You’re so good, darling,” she says, and feels Steve’s laugh huff across her ear. 

“You don’t gotta sweet-talk me, Barnes,” she says, a little raw. “You can have anything you want. Anything — god, Bucky — anything —” Two fingers up inside Steve’s cunt, Bucky ruts the meaty part of her palm against Steve’s clit, more eagerness than dexterity, and Steve groans, shoves her hips to meet Bucky’s hand. Bucky feels scrambled and graceless, hand fumbling and mouth sliding gawkishly against Steve’s neck, like she’s never fucking done this before. She hasn’t, really, hasn’t ever felt so unmade by the heat of someone else’s skin. 

“Yes —” Steve says, and — “Just like —” and — “Oh —” and — “You can — harder — you —”: bossy as anything, as every day Bucky’s known her, and Bucky follows, rocks her thigh up against the back of her hand so she can fuck up into Steve harder. Steve’s little gasps float off into the chill air and Bucky drops her forehead to Steve’s shoulder, tucking their bodies tight together. When Steve trembles, cunt clenching around Bucky’s fingers, Bucky feels her eyes go hot and prickling at the sweet, broken sound Steve makes. 

“Oh,” Steve says, or breathes. She slumps against Bucky, enough weight that Bucky staggers a little, pulling her hand from between Steve’s legs to grab at her hip. Steve nuzzles her neck; Bucky could cry. “Let me,” Steve murmurs, “let me touch you, Bucky, please, god —”

Bucky makes a sound, not quite words, but Steve’s nodding, saying nonsense, petting down her hip and pulling at the buttons on her fly. Leaning back against the tree, Steve lets Bucky sag against her, draws her in close with a foot tucked around the back of her calf, and slides her hand inside Bucky’s shorts. “I’ve wanted this,” Steve says, mouth on the short hairs behind Bucky’s ear, and her touch jerks at something hooked deep inside Bucky’s gut. She gasps; she burrows her face in the crook of Steve’s neck, leaving streaks of tears; she spreads her thighs and leans up against Steve’s impossible strength. 

A drop of sweat beads its way down the back of Bucky’s neck, despite the snow, and her chapped mouth chafes against the canvas of Steve’s uniform, dark blue like a bruise, like Bucky’s own jacket. Her hands clench at Steve’s hips, an unfamiliar span. Steve’s fingers on her cunt are clumsy, without enough room to maneuver, but Bucky is soaking, sticky down the thighs of her shorts, and Steve’s other hand pets at the sliver of bare skin she’s exposed above Bucky’s waistband, and Bucky might not be safe, and Steve might not be either, but they’re both here. 

“Stevie,” she says, and Steve says, “Yeah?” all full up of hope. She tilts her chin, mouths at Bucky’s temple, at her wet cheek.

“Buck —” she says, against the salt-smeared rise of Bucky’s cheek, and Bucky says, “Don’t stop.” Steve doesn’t; she flicks her fingertips over Bucky’s clit, slick and swollen, and kisses her. Bucky sags against her, soft like she hasn’t spent the past eighteen months held tight and hard, and Steve holds her up. Steve holds her, and kisses her cheek and her jaw and the corner of her chapped mouth, and rubs at her until Bucky catches her breath up in her throat, feeling her orgasm burst low in her gut, and trembles under Steve’s hand petting at her hip. 

“You’re glorious,” Steve says to Bucky’s mouth. Her nose rubs against Bucky’s cheekbone, a little chilled. Bucky’s eyes are wet. “Goddamn I love you.”

“Such a romantic,” Bucky says, laughing into the upturned collar of Steve’s suit. Steve laughs, too, slipping her hand out from between Bucky’s legs and leaning harder against the tree, holding Bucky to her. 

“You’re goddamn right,” Steve says. She cups Bucky’s neck absently, hand slick, rubs her wet fingertips up the short-shorn hair at the nape of Bucky’s neck. Bucky rubs her face against the shoulder of Steve’s uniform, wiping away the strange, hot tears that had welled up. They’re mostly gone, but her throat is sore like she’s swallowed something too fast. She thought she’d left her tears back in Brooklyn.

“They’re going to think you were _so_ mad,” Bucky says. She pulls back, just enough to see Steve’s face. It’s blotchy and pink, mouth bitten red and hair sticking damply to her temples where it’s fallen out of her braid. 

“What?” There’s a familiar little crease between her eyebrows. Bucky used to smooth it out, rub her thumb down it until Steve batted her hand away, tell her that it’d stick that way if she didn’t stop scowling.

“The guys. We’ve been gone for a while.” Steve’s eyes flicker wide then crease up as she laughs, a sound too delighted for the coolness of the air around them, for everything waiting for them on the other side of the trees. 

“Oh, god,” she says, laugh trailing off as she leans her forehead against Bucky’s. This close, her eyes are darker, shadowed by the damp fall of her hair. The deep, dark blue of the middle of the Atlantic. “Do you think they — know?”

“Maybe.” Bucky breathes out. “They’re not easy guys to keep a secret from. Well, except Dum Dum.” Steve cracks a smile, huffs a little laugh, breath skating over Bucky’s mouth. 

“Yeah,” she says, swallows hard. 

Bucky thumbs over Steve’s jawline, pulls away so she can see her, properly. “We’re trusting them with a lot,” she says. “What’s one more thing?” Steve looks at her, wide naked panic for one brief moment. 

When they were little, Steve seven or eight, Bucky maybe nine, not long after they’d met, they’d gotten detention after Steve shoved Joe D’Amico in the dirt for teasing a girl in a lower grade and Bucky backed her up, making sure he stayed there. Bucky thinks she might have sassed the nuns who came to break it up; she usually did. After school, they wrote their lines, Steve’s handwriting cramped and small even then, Bucky’s a little too big for the lined paper. When one of the sisters came in to dismiss them, she’d held Steve behind for a minute while Bucky gathered up her coat and lunch box. 

She would have gotten in more trouble if they’d found her eavesdropping, but she did it anyway. The sister asked Steve why she didn’t spend time with her other friends during the break after lunch, why she didn’t play with any of the nice girls in her grade. It took them a long time to work out who was a bad influence on whom; but then, Bucky’s still not sure. Steve had just said, “I don’t have any other friends,” puzzled like it was too obvious to bear saying. 

And that was it: like they’re still kids with scraped knees, Steve doesn’t much know how to trust anyone other than Bucky, or herself. It’s a lot to carry, but she’d never tell Steve that. 

“Yeah,” Steve says again, finally. She breathes out, scrunches up her face like she’s that same goddamn kid, stubbornly ready to face her Ma’s wrath. “Guess we’d better.”

++

Their pilot is a scrappy redhead who drops the plane to the ground in Little Staughton with a ruthless grace. It takes Bucky’s stomach half an hour to catch back up to her, and she feels, maybe for the first time, a little jealous of the way Steve bounds out of the airplane hatch and across the airfield apron, at the healthy flush on her cheeks. They have one immediate debrief before they’re dismissed to wander off to drinks or bed. Steve ignores both, heads off to write her report, claiming that it’s fresh in her mind. Bucky trails after her, to the little makeshift office that Steve shares with an RAF Flight Lieutenant and a USAAF Chief Warrant Officer, neither of whom are there when they arrive. Steve works at a metal desk crammed into one corner; it is stacked high with troop maneuver manuals, a couple of mission files, and a stolid hardcover copy of _The Machinery of War_ sitting up on top, thumbed through with bookmarks akimbo at the spine. Steve always was really good about doing her homework.

She shoves the pile to one side and pulls out a notepad, digging for a pen in the cup half-hidden behind the green-shaded lamp. Bucky hooks her toes around the leg of a chair, drags it over. Glancing up at her, Steve frowns. “Are you going to help?” she says, clearly skeptical.

Bucky gives an elaborate shrug as she drops into the chair. “Two heads,” she says. Steve doesn’t drop the frown, just brings pen to paper, writing out the date and the location of the mission at the top.

It is kinda like when they were kids, when Bucky would bring over Steve’s homework when she was out sick. Back then, of course, Bucky would sit next to Steve’s bed and pester her until she stopped doing her homework and they could play, or read a new comic book Bucky brought over, or look at Steve’s drawings and think about what would happen next in the stories they’d spin together. Steve’s pen scratches at the paper, and Bucky wonders what ever happened to the little comics that she and Steve had drawn. She’d wanted girl heroes, and Steve had given them to her: girls like them in school skirts and knee-high socks, in torn-up trousers and flat caps, who could fly and punch their villains and always won. 

Steve rips the top page off the pad, passes it to Bucky, breaking her daydream. She skims over it, grabs a pencil to add something in the margins, and turns to the typewriter shoved against the wall on the Flight Lieutenant’s desk. She doesn’t have to make corrections to the narrative as she types — Steve’s always had a good memory — but she adds in bits that Steve hadn’t been able to see, fleshes out the stakeout before the attack and Dum Dum’s movements after he was shot. In Steve’s version, she notices, Monty doesn’t turn back to rescue Steve from a soldier she was fighting, but was delayed by a skirmish with him himself. She must make a sound when she gets to that part, because Steve looks up, a little guiltily. 

“He’s not gonna do it again,” she says. “And I don’t need it put into anyone’s head that I needed the help.” 

“My god, Steve Rogers, you’re the stubbornest woman I know,” Bucky says, not without fondness. 

“I just want to do the job,” she says, a more bashful echo of when she’d said it earlier.

“Yeah,” Bucky says, kind of dryly, “like you’ve got nothing to prove.” Steve goes pink — annoyed, a bit, Bucky thinks — then wrinkles her nose and, not responding, picks up her pen again.

Agent Carter’s still in her office when they’re done, and Steve doesn’t seem surprised by that. She just knocks her knuckles against the door frame, a familiar sort of rat-a-tat-tat, and Carter looks up at her with a slow-spreading grin. 

“You made it back,” Carter says, gaze flicking from Steve to Bucky and back again. Her eyes don’t really linger on Bucky, haven’t ever, and Bucky finds herself a little bothered by it. Carter’s not one to miss things, she knows, which means she thinks she can get everything she needs from Bucky with just the barest glance. Like Bucky’s that readable. 

“Safe and sound,” Steve says, smile a little too wide and stiff. She holds out the file with Bucky’s typewritten pages.

Carter flips through them, one eyebrow lifting delicately. “Well,” she says as she reaches the end and flips it closed, “you most certainly inflicted more casualties than expected, but I’m hardly going to complain about that. Any problems?” 

“Um, no, ma’am.” Steve is still a terrible liar, too earnest and wide-eyed to be at all convincing, but Carter shrugs and drops the file on her secretary’s desk. 

“I’ve got a new report in from Howard on the guns you brought back to Italy,” she says. “Unless you’re off to bed?” She carefully keeps her eyes on Steve, doesn’t look at the narrow space between her and Bucky. 

Steve does, though, glances at Bucky even as she’s shaking her head, and Bucky rocks back on her heels, just enough to put another inch between them. “No, I can look,” Steve says, already moving to follow Carter. 

“I’ll just —” Bucky says, jerking her head toward the door. Steve gives her a long, unreadable look before she nods, and Bucky leaves them be.

The fellas didn’t go straight back to barracks; Bucky finds them in the makeshift clubhouse the NCOs formed in an unused storage shed. It’s horribly non-regulation, but as they don’t keep anything stronger than beer on hand and have a policy of only playing darts or poker for spare change, the brass mostly ignores it. They crowd together to make room for her, pour her a room-temperature beer out of a sticky pitcher in the center of the table. 

“Hey — hey —” A drunk USAAF Warrant Officer leans over and pokes at Jacques’s shoulder, earning him a slow, unimpressed glare. “I know you guys. You’re the ones fighting with that girl, the blonde one.” The air shifts; all six of them sit up a little straighter. “Fighting under her, I hear,” he says, waggling his eyebrows as though his point weren’t desperately clear. 

“Not nice to talk about a lady like that,” Dum Dum says, mildly enough. Bucky hopes he never says anything like that in Steve’s earshot. 

“A _lady_ ,” the guy says, incredulously. He slaps his hand against Gabe’s shoulder, like he’s heard the best joke, and Bucky watches Gabe’s fist curl up tight. “Ain’t no ladies out on the front lines,” he says, “just nurses and whores, and I can bet which one yours is. You all take turns with her or —” A cascade of chairs tumble to the ground as they stand nearly in unison, Gabe turning to grab the guy’s tie, holding him tight, and Jacques next to him twisting the guy’s arm up behind his back. 

“You don’t talk about Agent Rogers that way,” Bucky says, taking a step closer. Gabe and Jacques shift the guy, who struggles ineffectively between their hands, so that he’s facing Bucky head-on. “Do you understand?”

“I think I get it,” he slurs, apparently unconcerned. “She’s frigid, is that it? You want her but she won’t —” Jacques, casually, shoves his knee up behind the guy’s leg, sending him a little closer to the ground. It doesn’t shut him up. “Or you’re all fairies. Enjoying each other too much to —”

“Oh, _fucking_ hell,” Jim says, grabbing a pint glass like he’s going to throw it across the table. Before he can, Bucky draws her shoulder back and lands one neat, square punch in the guy’s solar plexus, doubling him over. Gabe and Jacques let go, so he falls to the floor, hitting his head a little on the table on the way down. It jostles the beer; the table will be sticky. He groans, but doesn’t stand up.

“Uh,” Bucky says. Her fist doesn’t hurt at all; she figures it must not have been a very hard punch. She squints at the guy on the floor. “We probably shouldn’t tell Steve we did that,” she says. No matter that Steve sticks up for the rest of the world; god help you if you try to defend her honor. Behind her, Dum Dum snorts.

“Didn’t see a thing,” he says.

“Just enjoying a drink,” Gabe adds, reaching for his pint, a little less full now that some has sloshed over the edge. Bucky and Jacques haul the guy up by his arms and leave him sprawled across a bench. He’s breathing and blinking blearily, so he’ll come to. A couple of RAF pilots play darts along the back wall, barely glancing at the commotion. 

A little roil of guilt curls its way around Bucky’s stomach. A memory of Steve’s face, red-flushed and angry, floats up in her mind; one of the myriad times Steve had told her off for interfering in one of Steve’s scrapes. As though Bucky would just leave her to it the next time, hang back as Steve took punches. Steve might not break so easily these days, but Bucky doesn’t foresee that changing her mind, much; if Steve’s throwing punches, Bucky’s knuckles are getting bloody, too. Never mind that tonight was far from the first time Bucky had roughed up a fella for talking shit about Steve: Steve was tiny, scrawny, mad, and mouthy, and there were plenty of fellas and not just a few women who found that hard to stomach.

As if he’s hearing her thoughts, Jim says, “This isn’t the first time you’ve fought in her name.”

Bucky rubs the tabletop, smearing a puddle of beer over its worn surface. “Nah,” she says. “She used to be sickly, but she’s always been —” angry, righteous — “outspoken. Lots of folks don’t like it.” She glances up at them, takes a look around the circle. They could have worked better together today, Steve’s not wrong about that at all. She stands by what she’d said to Steve: they need a little more practice, out in the field. But it’s also true that they don’t really know Steve, not the burning bright heart of her that Bucky knows, the certainty she holds deep in her core. 

“I can see that,” Dum Dum says, and then, “I kinda like it.” Bucky can’t help but give him a quick, narrow-eyed glare, so he lifts his hands and adds, “Entirely respectfully.” 

“It’s an unusual situation to be sure,” Monty says, circumspectly. 

“Give her some time,” Bucky says. 

“Bucky,” Gabe says, a little gently; he usually calls her _Barnes_ , or _Sarge_ , sometimes. “We’re sticking around.” 

“Jusqu’à la fin,” Jacques says, lifting a glass, and Gabe echoes, “To the end.” They clink glasses with gusto.

“You all are fucking maudlin,” Bucky says. But then, how many times had she said something similar to Steve, every time Steve tried to shrug off her help or tell Bucky she’d be better off without Steve’s illnesses costing her hard-earned salary. _To the very end of the fucking line, sweetheart_ , she thinks, and bashes her pint against Dum Dum’s.


	11. Chapter 11

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The smell of roasted bird and rosemary hits them as they round the staircase into the basement and make their way to the kitchen. Even the ground floor has expansive ceilings, walls and floors in wide swaths of marble worn with the years. There’s a big trestle table off the kitchen, and the team is spread out around it, passing around a jumble of plates as Dernier dishes up tiny breasts and thighs, dark meat glistening.

_April 1944, near Bazas, France_

A plane on its way to Algiers drops them outside of Bordeaux in the middle of the night, where they make an awful lot of jokes about wine while they find their bearings and begin to make their way to the house where they’ll meet their Resistance contacts in the morning. It’s Steve’s first time on French soil; when they land, Jacques makes a show of kissing the ground. He has reason to be happy; after they meet up with their contacts here, if all goes well, their second stop will be to liaise with the Resistance cell that his wife and sister-in-law are a part of. Their ride had picked them up outside of Utrecht, and they’ve been skittering around the Netherlands for three weeks, working with a small branch of the Dutch resistance to sabotage train and boat supply lines. Steve’s certain she’s not the only one who’s ready to stop wading through dikes and sleeping in abandoned windmills and barns.

As far as the SSR can tell, the Red Skull has retreated to a base deep in the Alps, too heavily fortified for them to approach yet. Zola keeps to Berlin, untouchable. So Steve’s team follow up on other leads: disrupting Hydra supply lines, capturing weapons and information, destroying smaller bases and factories. If they’re near an Allied camp, they’ll round up prisoners and drop them in the hands of a lucky General; more often they don’t take prisoners. In the SSR, they have a reputation as the resident Hydra specialists, the only squad to have faced Hydra-armed forces in multiple close engagements. When she sleeps, Steve sees flashes of blue behind her eyelids.

Howard still hasn’t cracked the power source of the Hydra weapons. If Peggy’s dry comments on the subject mean anything, it’s driving him spare and and keeping him single-minded. Steve wonders, a bit, if Howard’s pride is bruised by their current mission; he doesn’t seem the type to happily pass on his research, but Peggy had assured Steve, and presumably an intractable Howard, that Dr. Charpentier is trustworthy. They won’t actually meet him; their Resistance contacts will pick up the package in the morning and take it to Paris.

After a few hours of walking, they come up to the front gates of the estate, where a light shines immediately on them from the window of the gatehouse. When the door creaks open as they approach, hands held free and open, the grizzled face of an old man greets them above the barrel of a shotgun. Jacques speaks to him in a quick, hushed tone for a minute, and finally the man lowers his gun and shuffles out to open the gate. 

They make their way across the long driveway, its white gravel gleaming in the dark and crunching under their feet, up to the house. It’s more of a chateau than a house, really, and palatial compared to the accommodations they’ve gotten used to: cream colored stone, grey slate roof, and turrets on the corners; not a whiff of manure about it. The door towers over them, heavy carved wood and a knob the size of a child’s head in the center. Other than the gatekeeper, the estate should be unoccupied. Just as they’ve been told, there’s a clunky iron skeleton key shoved in the dirt of one of the urns flanking the door. Steve thinks of the key she’d always kept taped under a brick, at the place with her Ma and then later at her and Bucky’s; there, it was half because she was always losing her own and half because if someone was bound and determined to break in and steal what little they had, she’d just as soon they didn’t smash up the window.

Once they step inside, it’s hard to imagine that the absent owners of this house look at things the same way. The foyer is twice the size of the tenement apartment Steve grew up in. They all crane their necks up, to the sweeping tall ceilings with ornate plasterwork, acanthus and ivy and laurel twisting together in quatrefoil. Against the walls, dusty grey drop cloths cover a jumble of furniture with big, graceful lines. 

“Hard to think of this being left empty,” Jim says, turning in a circle, gaping up at a wrapped chandelier. 

“C’est juste une maison de campagne,” Jacques says. 

“More suspicious if someone’s always here,” Gabe adds.

They split up to scan the rooms, and when they’re satisfied that there’s no one else there, they start to poke around, ostensibly for supplies. Steve figures the rest of them are as curious as she is about the way someone would live in this house, in all this gilded echoing space.

She follows Bucky up the curving stairs and into a bedroom marked by a hulking bedstead, also covered in a drop cloth, and a fireplace with an inlaid mantel. Steve peers to look at it — it’s stunning work, really, tiny delicate flowers and curving vines picked out in different colored stone, all against the creamy white marble — while Bucky opens doors, pokes through cupboards. Steve leans over, reaches into the fireplace to check the flue. She’s still flushed and warm from the walk, but the high ceilings and plastered walls keep the chateau just this side of chilly, and it’s still getting cold in the evenings. It’s such an indulgence, to think in terms of comfortable heat rather than necessity; their contact had told them that the house was distant enough and the family eccentric enough that a few lights and smoke wouldn’t be much noticed. How different it must be, to feel at ease in and entitled to these spaces; nothing at all like the clamor of Brooklyn or the hard press the boys on the front lines must know. Steve finds the flue lever, pulls it open.

In her peripheral vision, Bucky disappears into a room that might be a dressing room or bathroom. Steve hears the screeching of metal against metal, the creak as Bucky opens another door, and then an almighty clatter. “Are you dead?” she calls out, and gets a grunt in return, then another crash. “Bucky —” she starts, moving toward the bathroom, when Bucky emerges, holding a gigantic basin in front of her like an offering.

It’s a hip-bath, copper a little tarnished, but with an elegant curve to the back. The first place she remembers living in with her Ma they’d had one, just old yellowed enamel. Steve remembers leaning back against the neck rest while Ma worked soap into her hair. 

Bucky’s grinning, pleased as a cat with a pigeon, and says, “What do you reckon?”

“That thing will barely fit you,” Steve says. Bucky lifts it up, like she’s taking its measures. It would hardly have fit Steve comfortably, in her old body.

Bucky shrugs. “I tried the taps — no running water. Figured this would be less to fill than the big bath.” She sets it down in the middle of the floor, eyes it like it might fill itself. It is small, but at the thought of hot, clean water Steve’s skin has already started to prickle.

“Guess I’d better start a fire, then,” Steve says.

Monty and Jim poke their heads in while Steve’s arranging some firewood brought up from the kitchen. “Dernier’s going to do something complicated with those doves we caught earlier,” Jim says. “Supper in an hour.” He looks around the room, runs his hand across the top of the mantel. Bucky sweeps the drop cloth off of the bed, revealing a carved wooden bedstead with gilded acanthus leaves and two fat flying cherubs on the headboard. Bucky grimaces as Jim laughs. “Plenty of beds in this place,” he says, carefully. From the ground, Steve lifts an eyebrow at him.

“Nice to have a mattress for once,” she says. It’s not precisely a confirmation, but she doesn’t really figure he needs one. She and Bucky lay out their bedrolls side-by-side most nights, but each keep to their gendered barracks when they’re on a base. It’s not a conversation they’ve had, the whole group, but it can’t possibly be required at this point, she thinks.

“There’s a water pump in the kitchen yard,” Monty says, tipping his chin to Bucky’s hip-bath. She grins, gives it a little kick. The copper rings eerily in the too-large space. 

“Guess I better get to hauling, then,” she says. 

Monty clasps Jim on the shoulder. “Let’s leave the ladies to their toilette,” he says, and when Steve gives him an unimpressed glare, he follows up with, “Not that I’d ever impugn your ladylike virtues, Captain —” like he wasn’t the one who planned to enter her as a ringer in an arm-wrestling contest the last time they found a pub in a half-intact town — 

“Demure as a princess,” Bucky adds, as if she hadn’t been the one to convince Steve to do it, in the end.

“— But Sarge smells like Dum Dum on a three-bean-ration night,” Monty continues, with a beatific smile, and backs out of the doorway, a cackling Jim following. 

Steve gets the fire roaring, and after digging up a couple of stew pots from the kitchen, they haul up enough water to at least cover the bottom of the bath, and nestle them around the flames. 

“You know,” Bucky huffs, “I think there’s a reason most people took baths in the kitchen, back in the day. Or had servants.” Steve grins. She’s not winded at all, even after lifting something that could easily be described as a cauldron up two flights of stairs. 

“Aw, darling,” she says, “You feeling a little out of breath?” She stands behind her, rubs at her shoulders.

“I hate you,” Bucky says, swatting her hands away. 

“Don’t be sore,” Steve says, though she knows Bucky’s in just about as good a mood as they get these days. She wants it to linger, wants to let it seep through them both. Leaning in, she kisses Bucky behind the ear, on the neck, in the hollow of her shoulder. Her skin is heavy with salt, her uniform damp with drizzle and reeking of wet wool. “Monty was right, though,” she says, reaching one hand around to cup Bucky’s hip, pull her closer.

“I never want to hear those words out of your mouth when you’re doing that,” Bucky says, obligingly tilting her head to one side. 

Steve laughs against her skin, breathes her in. “I just mean that you stink,” she says, and licks up the tensed muscle of her neck. She does: rank sweat and mud, blood and cordite, and many, many days spent in the damp outdoors. 

“I’m trying to fix that,” Bucky says, a little peevishly. Steve slides her hands up, tugs open the buttons on Bucky’s coat. It’s off quick enough, then her shirt, but Bucky undoes her own trousers, sliding them and her shorts down at once. She kicks them to one side, an untidy bundle, and turns around to face Steve. “This is all very fun,” she says, mouth on Steve’s, “but I really am disgusting.”

Steve laughs. The smell of sweat and blood on Bucky’s skin is as familiar as home. Sure, now it’s worse than the slaughterhouse stink she used to come home with, but it’s not like Steve’s been smelling perfume and roses in her spare time. “You are,” she says, lifting up one of Bucky’s arms and burying her nose in the soft hair underneath. “Absolutely filthy,” she says, and sucks on the tender, soft skin of her inner arm until Bucky gasps. The smell of her fills Steve’s nose, her mouth, heavy and clinging and sour, and she licks and licks at her, feeling the way Bucky sags against her. 

“ _Hell_ ,” Bucky says when she pulls away. Her eyes are fluttered wide open. “Jesus, Steve,” she says, catching Steve’s lip between her teeth, licking into her mouth. 

Steve slides one hand between Bucky’s legs. Her pubic hair is gummed together, tangled, but when she parts it, Bucky is soaked between her lips, hot slick coating Steve’s hand. “You’re so _wet_ ,” she says into Bucky’s mouth, petting at her cunt without any real aim. Bucky groans, rocking against Steve’s hand. Steve pulls her hand away, wanting to have her mouth on Bucky there, urgently, and then says, “— Or —” when she gets a glimpse at the pool of sticky, viscous blood in her palm. 

Bucky looks at her hand. “Oh,” she says. “I haven’t seen that in a while.” At Steve’s lifted eyebrow, Bucky shrugs, unconcerned. “It kind of — stoppered up, since I’ve been over here.”

“Huh.” Some days it feels like all they see is blood, spilling dark from their own bullets on the best of days, streaking across their own skin on the worst. But this blood sits warm and thick in her hand, clotted and crimson, evidence of Bucky’s life, not in danger for this long night. 

“How about yours?” Bucky asks, offhand. She’s surprised Bucky hasn’t taken notice of it — she always had a beefsteak ready at the right time, before — but then, they’ve got other things on their minds these days. 

“Every twenty-eight days,” she says. The serum seemed to knock it right into place; she almost wishes she’d asked if they could just knock it right out of her instead. “Like my womb has a calendar.” Bucky laughs even at Steve’s woeful resignation; in retaliation, she swipes her hand over Bucky’s hip, leaving it streaked with blood. 

“Hey, now, I’m supposed to be getting clean,” Bucky says, but she’s laughing. She pulls away from Steve a bit, motions toward the fireplace. “Water’s probably good enough, now,” she says, but Steve grasps her wrist, keeps her in place, and drops to her knees in front of her.

“Give it a bit,” she says, nudging Bucky’s thighs apart. Bucky blinks at her, a little stunned, but plants her feet wider.

When Steve licks deep in the crease of her thigh, tasting sour, heavy sweat, Bucky groans but says, “Steve, you don’t gotta —”

“I want to,” Steve says, spreading Bucky open with her thumbs. Between her lips, her cunt is swollen, opening up for Steve, glistening red, and Steve covers her with her mouth, licks up into her, lets the heavy, sour, rich taste coat her tongue. Bucky trembles, exhaling shakily, and brings her hands to Steve’s head. Steve hums encouragingly, wanting Bucky to twist her hands up in Steve’s hair, to hold her there hard and firm, to rock herself against Steve’s willing mouth. 

Bucky’s groan breaks into a little, hard laugh, and she does curl her fingers into Steve’s hair, pulled loose from its pins, and cants her hips upward, thighs spreading wider. “You’re filthy,” she says, with such wonder and fondness in her voice that Steve moans, mouth trembling against Bucky’s clit. “God, Steve, your mouth,” Bucky says, hands clenching. 

The motion tugs at her hair, just enough to smart, and she leans against it, deeper into Bucky’s cunt, just to feel the pull. Bucky obliges, winding her fingers into the damp thicket of hair at the back of Steve’s head and curling them, holding her hard and tight. When Steve’s eyes flutter open wider, looking up, Bucky’s looking down at her with softness in the damp tremble of her mouth. Steve holds Bucky by the back of her thigh, one broad hand gripping the trace of softness in the crease of her buttock, and licks hard on her clit, enjoying the way Bucky’s thigh trembles under her palm. 

All she can taste, all she can breathe, is Bucky, sour and thick and familiar in a way that shocks her, a little. Bucky, in all of Steve’s heightened senses: the throb of her blood and the panting rasp of her breath. She doesn’t say much, now, hard breath and little whimpers that wash over Steve. Under Steve’s tongue, Bucky’s clit swells, insistent and hard, and Steve anticipates the way Bucky will jerk her hips in short, struggling little bursts as she gets closer to the edge. She grips Bucky’s leg tight, licks her harder, feels her breath labor a bit in the enveloping press as Bucky’s grip twists and her muscles tense up. Bucky’s quiet but for a short hitch of breath as she comes, and Steve wishes they had longer here, nights enough to get used to all that sound-absorbing space. Still: Bucky’s breath catches hoarsely, and her hips jerk, and under Steve’s spread-wide palm her thigh trembles, and it’s plenty, it’s more than she could have hoped for.

Steve sits back on her heels, doesn’t wipe her mouth. Bucky holds one hand in Steve’s hair and looks down at her, mouth slack. “You’re a mess,” she says, fond and breathless, and leans one hand heavily on Steve’s shoulders. “You’re — fuck, Steve.” Letting go of Steve’s hair, Bucky drags her thumb down the center of Steve’s mouth, through the slickness that coats her lips, and down her neck, her sternum. A meridian of blood: Bucky’s. 

“I bet the water’s hot,” Steve says, smiling up at her. Bucky laughs, weakly, lifts her heavy hand away, cups Steve’s jaw. 

“I’ll wash your hair,” Bucky says. She’s done it before, many times. A palmful of soap, and Steve weak and lank and a little annoyed with the restlessness that always came at the tail end of a bout of illness, in the tub with Bucky kneeling awkwardly to the side, elbows gangling over the edge to reach Steve’s hair.

They’ve heated just enough water to fill the hip-bath twice, with an extra bucket-full to rinse clean at the end, and Bucky goes first, groaning elaborately as she sinks her ass into the water, knees tucked up to her chest. Her feet alone immediately turn the water murky. Steve sits cross-legged on the floor next to the bath, naked, fingers idling in the water. “What a treat,” Bucky says, a little sleepily, as she leans her head back against the neck rest. 

Steve had wiped her face before they filled the tub, but she can still taste iron and salt in her mouth. She touches her fingertips to the tender rise of her lower lip, feeling the slight swell. Bucky has rolled her head to face Steve, looks at her with half-open eyes. “You wanna touch yourself?” she asks, a little lazily.

“Huh?” When she’d dropped to her knees it had been driven by the heat of the fire, the comfort of the room, the sharp-sweat smell rolling off of Bucky, but there is a little heat between her own thighs, now, a sort of sticky desire. 

“I’m real comfy,” Bucky says, spreading her hands, palms up, to wryly encompass the way she’s crowded in the hip-bath, knees jack-knifed and sticking out of the water, elbows lolling off the sides. “C’mon, Miss Victory, give me a show.” 

Steve feels all her blood rise up to the surface. “They weren’t _that_ kind of show,” she says. Bucky waggles her eyebrows. 

“You don’t gotta,” she says, though, a little more serious. She says it a lot, like she’s waiting for the thing that will make Steve back down, step away. Steve doesn’t think there is such a thing. So she moves more to the front of the bath, where the ledge is shallower and Bucky can see all of her if she lets her knees fall open a little, and does, spreads her legs, holding herself up with one hand behind her. Bucky’s mouth parts, wetly. 

“You know,” Steve says, letting her fingertips scratch over the curls of hair between her legs, “I used to touch myself under the covers when you came home late. Thinking about what you maybe were getting up to, what you might be doing and with what girl.” She uses two fingers to part her lips, show Bucky that she’s wet. Bucky makes a soft little sound, leans forward in the tub. Water sloshes over the edges onto the parquet floor. 

“Didja now,” Bucky says, hoarsely. Steve nods, trying to look serious.

“I thought about what it’d feel like, to have you between my legs.” She draws the tip of her middle finger over her clit, muscles of her gut clenching up at the hot, lovely little shock of pleasure it gives. “Your fingers in me,” she says, teasing two of her own fingers at her entrance, slipping them inside where she’s soft, a little tight. She likes to just rock them in and out, gentle on the tender inside curve of her body, and she keeps her palm cupped open so Bucky can see the way she spreads, wet and red, around them. Bucky’s mouth is open, little shock of red appearing when she flicks her tongue out to wet her lower lip. 

“What else?” Bucky says.

“I wondered if you’d lick me,” she says. “I knew people did.” She’s told Bucky about Dolores, a little shy even while Bucky beamed at her, proud and amused, and kissed her and said something about writing Dolores a thank you card. Even so, it’s no secret that she hadn’t been touched before that. “Or —” and this is true, but it feels almost filthier than what she’s already confessed — “sometimes I thought about you waking up, and hearing me, and —”

“And?” Bucky’s hand, the one she’d been using to soap herself up, has strayed to the little peak of her breast, the nipple rising up pink between two knuckles. 

“And pulling my blankets back. Watching me.” 

“Sounds like a good idea,” Bucky says. Steve pushes her fingers in deeper, up to her palm, and shifts forward enough to bring her other hand to her clit. “You’re so pretty like this,” Bucky says, leaning forward more. She clutches the edge of the tub with one hand. “And you woulda been so pretty, then, too, embarrassed and pink. Spread open for me.” Steve nods, but thinks: she might not have — if Bucky had looked at her like this, then, it might have been too much. But it’s nice to think she might have let her look. 

Under her fingers, Steve’s clit is hard, almost too sensitive to touch directly. Instead, she rubs just above it, at the root, and thrusts her fingers inside her cunt. “Keep talking,” she says, voice breathless; Bucky exhales, hard.

“You’re the most beautiful girl, you know that? Always were,” Bucky says; it’s said earnestly, not filthy at all, but it still hooks something in Steve’s gut. 

“You don’t gotta sweet talk me,” Steve says; Bucky rolls her eyes. 

“Treating you like a lady and here you are, complaining,” she says, and then, before Steve can answer, “Guess I’ll just tell you how pretty your cunt is, then. You get so fucking wet, Stevie, I don’t even know how.” Steve fucks herself harder; she _is_ wet, the smacking sounds of her quick-moving hands seeming awful loud in the big room. “Did you always, or is that new too?”

Steve shakes her head. “That’s not new, but —” She jerks her fingertips up and down, on either side of her clit, watching Bucky’s gaze fall back between her legs. “I feel so much — so much more now.” Bucky’s nodding, mouth dropped open a bit as she watches Steve’s hands move.

“I know,” she says. “I mean, you must — just seeing you, god. Steve, you’re like nothing I ever — you’re so —” Bucky can’t even finish a thought, but it doesn’t matter; it’s all there in the way she watches Steve, like she can’t quite believe it. Steve can feel something start to coil up in her gut, can feel the way her cunt opens up around her fingers, soft and expansive and yielding, and when Bucky wrenches her eyes up to meet Steve’s, wide and hungry, Steve tips over the edge. Her body clenches down, hard, on fingers made clumsy by the wetness that spreads across her inner thighs, down her ass, and the tightening in her abdomen throws her whole body forward, crumpling. 

Breathing hard, she leans forward, supporting herself on her bent legs, and lets her hand slip out. Bucky surges forward and grasps it; water splashes over Steve’s feet. She takes Steve’s fingers in her mouth, sucks them clean. 

“ _Jesus_ ,” Steve says, a little exhausted. 

“The sisters would rap your knuckles, using your lord’s name in vain,” Bucky says, mouthing a little at Steve’s slick palm. 

Steve laughs. “I think I’d be in a sight more trouble with them for other things,” she says, and Bucky laughs, too.

“It’s your turn,” she says, letting Steve’s hand drop and standing up. Water slips down her lean body, and Steve doesn’t stop herself from looking. Bucky’s put back on some of the heft she had lost in the camp, and more, a steady expanse to her thighs and shoulders, distinct muscles in her calves as she steps out of the tub. No new cuts or bruises for a few days, and the older ones healing up nicely. Bucky lets her look, towels off her hair first, and Steve thinks she knows Steve’s need to check in, to make sure the inches of Bucky’s skin she can’t usually see are still unbroken. She’s caught Bucky with the same searching glance more than once, at any rate.

Bucky wraps the towel around her hips and together they carry the tub to the bathroom, dump the dirty water down the drain, and refill it. Steve doesn’t linger overlong; she barely fits enough to cover more than just her lap with water, and they’ve got supper to get to, anyway.

++

They use the servants’ staircase to go back down to the kitchen, carrying with them their gaggle of stew pots to refill after dinner. Steve still wants to give their clothes a good cleaning tonight, so she’s left off her uniform blouse, wearing her least-reeking camisole with the sleeves of her suit tied up around her waist. It’s cool in the house, but her blood is up from — well — and she runs a little hot now, anyway. Bucky, too, has tossed her open jacket over an undershirt that’s not horribly stained and left off her belt. 

The smell of roasted bird and rosemary hits them as they round the staircase into the basement and make their way to the kitchen. Even the ground floor has expansive ceilings, walls and floors in wide swaths of marble worn with the years. There’s a big trestle table off the kitchen, and the team is spread out around it, passing around a jumble of plates as Dernier dishes up tiny breasts and thighs, dark meat glistening. 

“Welcome,” Gabe says as they pull out chairs, one delicately lifted eyebrow conveying volumes. Steve might be a little embarrassed, to know that they all realize that the warm flush to her cheeks is not solely due to a stoked fire and a hot bath, but she’d be hard pressed to feel guilty. 

“Ça sent bien,” Steve says to Jacques as he passes a plate to her. There’s a handful of tiny, tender spring greens on the side and some potatoes, roasted with salt and duck fat that Jim had snagged in Utrecht before they left, trading them for the Italian cigarettes apparently favored by the assistant cook at a hotel that operated as a message-point for the Resistance. Steve’s pretty sure, as commander, that she’s supposed to discourage them from bartering when their assignments take them further afield, but Jim had started last month with a tin of spam from his C-ration and the duck fat glistens on the crisp edges of the potatoes like gold, so she’s not saying a word. 

“And there’s more,” Gabe says, reaching under the table to pull out two bottles of wine, a little dusty on the necks. Steve raises an eyebrow. “There’s a wine cellar,” he says, like it’s obvious. It is, actually, in this place. 

“And you thought you’d help yourself —” 

“We thought it’s what our hosts would want,” Jim says, taking one bottle and leveraging the cork out expertly.

“And as they’re not here,” Monty adds, taking the bottle to pour generous portions, “we thought it was only polite.” Beside her, Bucky’s laughing, taking a delicately-stemmed glass from Monty and lifting it.

“Cheers to that,” she says, and they all clink. The wine is deep crimson red, and smooth and rich on her tongue. It’ll do nothing to her, she knows now, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t nice. The doves taste iron-rich and at the first bite, Steve has to look down and will the flush off her cheeks at how it fills her mouth, coats its surfaces, just like licking up Bucky’s salt-rich blood and wetness. When she swallows and looks up, Bucky’s looking right at her, cocked grin saying she knows Steve’s mind. Steve wipes her mouth with the back of her hand and eats a slice of potato instead; everyone else at the table is too caught up in their own enjoyment to notice. 

The edge of hunger in Steve’s stomach has grown familiar, as keeping up with the demands of her new body is not always easy in the field, and she forces herself to eat slowly, to take in the flavors and feel her body become sated. She knows Bucky’s watching her to make sure she gets enough, too, an unnecessary fussing but one she’s had to allow since she nearly passed out after the end of a mission outside of Eindhoven when they missed breakfast and lunch. She’d come back to herself with Bucky practically shoving a chocolate bar down her throat and had figured out quick enough to nibble at her b-unit dessert, usually a fat- and sugar-rich chocolate something-or-other, throughout the day. When they’re just on C-rations, she refuses to eat more than the rest of the men, but they’ve enough good shots to supplement rations with game and, now that it’s spring, things like the tender, sweet little greens Monty picked from the overgrown flowerbeds in the kitchen garden, so she’s stopped complaining when whoever’s dishing gives her a little more.

They didn’t have much opportunity for game in Brooklyn; Bucky might have joked about sling-shotting a pigeon or two but she never quite mustered the guts to actually do so. When the serum cleared up her various and sundry sinus issues, Steve found, with only a little shock, that there were more subtleties of taste to be enjoyed than what could be achieved by adding a little more salt or butter to yesterday’s dinner. She and Bucky have never been gourmands — it’s a minor miracle that they ate full meals most days the years they lived together — and logically Steve knows that a doctored-up ration pales in comparison to even just decent home cooking, but after a long day’s fighting or marching, the sorts of things Jacques, Monty, and even Dum Dum are able to throw together are a little thrilling. 

It might help that someone always has a story to go along with dinner. It’s kind of a tradition, now, to pool a couple of tins of rations together, whoever’s on cook duty tossing in some extra seasoning or roasting some game, and someone offering up a story about meals past while they wait for everything to cook up. She knows about Gabe’s Ma’s Sunday pork roast, can just about picture the dumplings Jim still thinks about after a trip up to San Francisco, has argued with Dum Dum over the best hot dogs in New York, has tried to copy the deft technique for deboning quail that Jacques learned from his father, and has made Monty promise to take her to the little bakery in Epping that serves up the perfect Madeira cake. She and Bucky mostly horrify them all with tales of overcooked cabbage soup, but they also share a bit of a longing look over the memory of Mrs. Barnes’s slow-braised brisket. 

Across from her, Bucky’s looking thoughtfully at the last little scraps of bone on her plate, picked clean. “Hell of a Passover seder.” 

“Shit,” Steve says. “Is it tonight?” Mrs. Barnes had kept track of the high holidays on a calendar in the Barnes family kitchen; as far as Steve knows, Bucky had always relied on her Ma to know when they fell each year. 

Sure enough, Bucky shrugs up one shoulder. “Near enough, I figure. Not exactly traditional,” she says, but she’s smiling softly.

“Do you wanna —” Steve spreads her hands out in front of her, a question. “I probably could remember some of the parts,” she adds. She’s been to enough seders at the Barnes house over the years; the four questions are already starting to rise in her mind.

Bucky thinks about it, but shakes her head. “Do you remember — oh, four or five years ago — that year when Miriam found the afikoman before we’d even started and ate it all?”

Steve laughs, picturing Miriam’s flushed face, so pleased with herself. “She left a trail of crumbs all down the hallway.” Bucky picks up the thread, tells them about the sweet little candies Mr. Barnes would order in special to tuck in their lunches for the seven days, about how she and her sisters learned to make matzo, to form it into dumplings, kugel, pies. 

“Susanna was always the best, even when she was little,” Bucky says. Steve remembers Susanna’s hands, so deft and nimble. Secretly, she thinks that’s something Bucky shares with her sister, along with a quick laugh; Bucky’s hands are just good at things other than pastries. 

“You were never patient enough,” Steve says, remembering well sharing Bucky’s sloppily-formed meat pies at lunch once or twice, the dough so thick it was still a little chewy and raw in the middle. Bucky scoffs at her, but doesn’t deny it. 

“Last year —” Bucky says, and then corrects herself — “The last year before I left, Miriam almost refused to ask the questions.”

“Didn’t want to be seen as the baby,” Jim says, nodding. “George is just the same.” His little brother is just about Miriam’s age, too, and has had to grow up too fast in this war. Jim doesn’t know where they’re held, exactly, George and his parents, just that some months after he went off to basic their whole neighborhood was cleared out and moved to camps. They aren’t allowed to write much. No one much talked about it in Brooklyn, if they even knew; Steve only learned that the government was doing it when on the road with the USO, and she just about deserted. 

“Near broke my Ma’s heart,” Bucky agrees, somberly, drawing Steve’s attention back to the conversation. “She came around in the end.” Steve doesn’t remember that; it must have been before she came over. That spring is hazy, colored all over by the growing war, by men in khaki, by a pulled-tight tension between her and Bucky. In her memory, the girls are little more than background figures. A harsh little pellet of guilt forms in her gut.

It’s odd: Bucky’s sisters can hardly be called _girls_ anymore, all of them young women. Rebecca she’s always known the best, sharing a grade for most of their lives, but this far away, in this strange and dreamy place, with Bucky’s voice lingering on stories of holidays past, Susanna and Miriam seem caught in the hazy storm of youth, bright-cheeked and small.

It sends them off, thinking about the kids back home. Jim doesn’t speak of his fears, but tells them instead about showing George how to make a slingshot when the kid was barely old enough to hold it, and then blaming him when their Ma’s best vase broke with a wayward pebble. Monty lifts the little jar of dried rosemary that Jacques found in a cupboard, breathing it in indulgently, and tells them about the kitchen garden his sister keeps behind her house in Bournemouth. Steve can almost picture it: rows of herbs and carrots, one indulgent flowerbed, an apple tree that leans over the neighbor’s fence more and more each year. She’s happy for the distraction. He has three nieces who had been evacuated during the Blitz, but they’re back home now, and his sister sends letters with their names all signed at the end, the babyish scrawl of the youngest giving way to the careful, practiced hand of the oldest. They only get letters when they’re at base in England, so it’s been weeks since any of them have had news from home, and sharing what they do know, what they remember, helps all of them keep at bay the anxiety over all that could happen.

There are noises of appreciation, dramatic groans, and theatrical pats of very full bellies as they finish up. Monty refills the glasses around the table, a third then a fourth empty bottle sitting in the center. Her second glass is earthier, carrying with it the mineral-richness of the dark soil they’d trod on their walk in. Across from her, Bucky sprawls a little in her chair, a slack sort of ease Steve hasn’t seen in months — oh, years, maybe. 

“Lightweight drunk,” Jim says, elbowing Bucky, who slumps dramatically away from him and makes a face. 

“She’s always been that way,” Steve says, fondly. “Used to hafta drag her home after a night at the bars.”

“Damned rotten lies, Rogers,” Bucky says, kicking at Steve’s feet under the table and missing. She straightens up a little, more alert in a blink. “Half a beer and this one had to be carried home,” Bucky says, which Steve will admit is closer to the truth. “If she wasn’t already in a fight by that point.” It’s said absolutely without annoyance, which is a damned sight far from the way Steve remembers Bucky cursing her name more than once.

“Or throwing up in an alley,” Steve adds ruefully. “Don’t miss that at all.”

“Never been to Brooklyn,” Jim says. “There a lot of bars for —” He gestures between Bucky and Steve, casual-like, and Steve doesn’t get it for a second, but Bucky ducks her head, lets out a short little snort.

“Sure,” she says. “Nearer the docks. But Stevie’s respectable; I never took her to any of them. Mostly just down to McGrath’s, the kinda place you could get a lady’s half-glass.”

“You went to the queer bars, though,” Steve says. She knows, even if Bucky never told her. 

Bucky shrugs up one shoulder, gives her a look that might be apologetic. Steve’s tried not to think overmuch about what might have happened, back before, if Bucky hadn’t have spent so much time being protective of Steve, and if Steve hadn’t spent so much time resenting it. “Best places for dancing,” she says.

“That’s true,” Gabe says. “I don’t know about Brooklyn, but the places in Harlem — damn, man, the dancing.” He grins, looking down at his hands, and something shifts at the table, something soft and easy, when he looks back up and says, “I learned a damn lot in those bars.” Steve bumps his shoulder with her own, feeling a little overwhelmed, feeling like something’s dropped into place.

“Yeah,” Bucky says, a little soft, then to Steve: “I’m sorry I never took you.”

“Next time we’re in London,” Monty says. “I know some chaps who could direct us to the right doors.” The last time they were in London, Monty knew some chaps who could get them gin, the last of the autumn apples, and, memorably, a silk gown that Steve had nearly been tempted by, so Steve figures he has some chaps for just about anything. 

“I’m not one for dancing,” Dum Dum says, “but if the bars sell something better than warm beer I’m in.” 

“You and Steve can sit at the bar while the rest of us kick up,” Bucky says, innocent grin at Steve, who narrows her eyes.

“Who else here just spent a year with an actual chorus line?” Steve fires back.

“They teach you to dance?” Jim asks, and Steve shrugs.

“Well enough,” she says; at the least they’d helped her figure out how to keep her newly-balanced feet in line.

“God help them,” Bucky says. “I swear you’ve got at least four left feet.” Steve kicks at Bucky’s ankle under the table.

“You a hoofer, Barnes?” Dum Dum asks, giving a little shoulder wriggle that makes Gabe cover a laugh — poorly — with an elaborate cough.

“I hold my own,” Bucky says, which is more than true. 

“These girls, though, Buck —” Steve grins at the memory, thinking of that night in Philly, when Bess and Aggie had cleared out the whole dance floor, moving quicker than the eye could follow. “Even you couldn’t have hoped to keep up.” Bucky raises one eyebrow, slow and deliberate, and Steve knows she’s thinking of the confession Steve had made, about making time with Dolores. It’s not like Bucky’s complaining overly about the things Steve had learned; it’s only that she gets the feeling that Bucky figured Steve would stay untouched until the night of her wedding to a nice boy from the neighborhood, a fantasy she seems to have constructed without any sort of consideration over Steve herself. 

“Is that a challenge?” Bucky says, and before Steve can answer, Bucky’s up, grabbing Gabe’s hand and pulling him out of his chair. She spins him in, so his back is up against her chest. He only falters for a minute, turning back out and lifting his hand to spin her underneath it. 

Steve shakes her head. “Aggie and Bess could dance circles around you both.” They do a couple more steps, Gabe giving a fleet-footed Lindy, but neither are very good at following, so they bump into each other hopelessly. They’re still grinning when they give up, though, and Bucky gives a sweeping bow and plants a smacking kiss on Gabe’s hand. 

“Kinda sad we missed your show, now,” Gabe says. “Haven’t seen any decent dancing in an age.”

“It was mostly high-kicks and the like,” Steve admits. “Not nearly what they were capable of.” It’s a shame, she still thinks. When she’d asked, Peggy had dug up the amended tour schedule for her; they oughta be in Morocco now, ready to head back to the U.S. and then off to the Pacific theater soon enough. She hopes the men appreciate them. “I was pretty terrible,” she admits, with a little laugh.

“Dancing, though,” Jim says, gesturing toward the stairs, and Gabe says, “Oh!”

“We found something else, not just the wine cellar,” he continues. “Something you outta see.” Steve wipes her hands, stands up. She thinks about washing up, thinking of her Ma’s strict after-dinner rules, well drilled-in, but the guys are already up and piling out of the kitchen.

“In the ballroom,” Jim says, leading them toward the stairs, and behind her, Bucky says, “There’s a _ballroom?_ ”

“Yeah,” Gabe says. “Something tells me you won’t want to dance, though.”

They’ve left the doors to the ballroom open, and for a moment Steve’s distracted by the gleam of gilded mirrors all along one wall; they throw the light every which way, and from across the room their reflections are distorted, made tenuously tall. But she quickly sees what they mean: dozens of wooden crates, all different sizes, crowd along the inner side of the room. Nearest to them stands a crate at least twelve feet tall, pulled away from the wall a little. She’s not sure how it cleared the doors to the room, its hulking presence seeming to fill the space. 

She walks closer, seeing that they’ve pried off one side of the crate and leaned it against the wall. From the opening a tangle of straw tumbles across the floor. As it falls away, it reveals the stark, dramatic curve of a marble wing, flung back a few feet above Steve’s head. 

“Oh,” she breathes out. Obscured from view, the midsection is wrapped in padding, but in the shadow of the crate, the sculpture’s knee, at eye level, juts forward, a hopeful, forceful thrust. She reaches out, almost without thinking, to touch the rippled folds of drapery. Under her fingertips, the marble is chilled, rubbed smooth with age on the inner curves of the folds. 

“If I believed in signs,” Gabe says, soft and low. Reverent.

“Yeah,” Steve says, quiet. The _Winged Victory_ , thrust out of time, charging into their paths.

Bucky nudges her over, to take a closer look. Steve can’t pull her hand away, running her fingers down the rippling, draped folds. 

“It’s the Nike of Samothrace,” Steve says. “Do you remember? In that book I had —” Her Ma had bought her this tremendous tome, _Gardner’s Art Through the Ages_ , the first place she’d seen all the art she would later study. She’d spent hours making mental lists, creating maps punctuated by the Chartes Cathedral, the David in Florence, the Ghent Altarpiece. The _Winged Victory_ on its prow in the Louvre. 

“It’s beautiful,” Bucky says, hushed. It is: the jut of her wing above their heads covered in powerful feathers, closer to the span of an eagle than any delicate sparrow, the deep ripples of her drapery like waves on a stormy Atlantic. She trails her fingers after Steve’s, down the rise of the _Victory_ ’s hip. “Isn’t it supposed to be in one of those big museums?”

“Yeah,” Steve says. “The Louvre.” It hits her, and she turns, narrowing her eyes. “You opened a crate from the _Louvre?_ Containing one of the most priceless works of art in the world —”

They have the dignity to look a bit ashamed. “Hey now,” Jim says, “it’s not like they were labeled. Could have had anything in them.” He lifts his eyebrows, mock innocence. 

“You never know,” Gabe says. “The rest still could.” He tilts his head meaningfully to the other crates piled up behind the _Victory:_ boxy square ones and thin, rectangular ones leaning stacked against the wall, and two absolutely enormous boxes, only a foot thin but the size of a room across. She gets his meaning half a breath after he says it and thinks, _I might never go to Paris_ and then _They might never get back to Paris._

“Absolutely not,” Steve says. She knows her voice wavers. 

“We’ll be real careful,” Gabe says, all blinking innocence. She rakes her eyes over the piled crates, wonders what marvels they contain. He’s gotta be itching to see inside them as much as her; he draws, too, and they’ve talked about all the things they’d like to see all around the world if given the chance. 

“Carefully,” she says, finally. “Like they’re baby fucking birds. And wash your hands first.” Gabe’s eyes light up, and Dum Dum lifts a crowbar from behind the _Victory’_ s opened lid. “Fucking gently,” Steve says to him again, sternly. He holds his fingers up in a scout salute.

From one crate Jacques pulls three pretty still lifes, flowers done in gleaming tones like jewels, a coral-red lobster, the curl of an orange peel about to tumble off the edge of a table. Lush and abundant, these delicately-drawn treasures have always seemed as fantastical to Steve as the judgment of Paris or Venus rising up from a scallop shell. Yet, held between Jacques’s hands in the gilded light of the ballroom, they seem almost paltry. 

Dum Dum and Monty find three woe-eyed Madonnas and one pious Magdalene, a full crate of Greek black-figure amphorae, and a few sweet, pastoral landscapes. At the other end of the room, Bucky and Jim have leveraged the corner off of one of the enormous flat crates, and at the glimpse of painted architecture as they lift the lid away, Steve knows it: the three brothers, and their gleaming swords, and their crying wives and sisters. 

“Well,” Jim says, and Gabe says, “Yeah.”

“It’s a touch obvious, given the circumstances,” Monty agrees.

Even with the crate propped against the ground, Steve has to crane her neck back to take in the scene of the three brothers making their oath to fight for the good of Rome. Brothers-in-arms, literally, clasping one another and reaching as one for their swords. Sharp, eager: honorable. Even the women weeping in the corner seem resigned to the force of the men’s honor, leaning limply on one another. In those short weeks between Bucky shipping out and Steve’s letter from Erskine, a telegram had been delivered to Mrs. Edelstein, downstairs, and there’s nothing in the rosy-cheeked dolor of these neoclassical women that even resembles the weeping Steve had heard through the floor that night. 

Still, she thinks, it’s masterful in its coldness. She helps Bucky and Jim replace the cover, drive the nails back in to the corners, tucking all that honor and willing sacrifice and noble mourning away. Behind it, the next enormous crate holds _Liberty Leading the People_ , and Bucky slings her arm around Steve’s neck and grins up, broadly, at the bare-breasted Liberty with her tricolor flag. 

“This is more like it,” she says, a little too loudly in Steve’s ear, and Steve swats her away. “Aw, Miss America, are you sore that your uniform isn’t quite so fetching?”

“If I wanted to get my tits blown off,” Steve says, more peevishly than she really feels. 

“I take it back,” Monty says. “ _This_ is obvious.”

“Yeah,” Dum Dum says. “Cap up there leading us, little Sarge next to her, guns blazing.” He gestures to the over-eager urchin next to Liberty, whose nose, Steve must admit, does bear a little bit of a resemblance to Bucky’s own. 

“Hey!” Bucky grabs Dum Dum around the neck, scrambling at him like they’re going to wrestle, and Dum Dum holds solid and steady until she does a little twist that throws her center of gravity low and he folds. They tussle a little, amiable and without malice, and Steve watches mostly to be sure they don’t knock a foot through any centuries-old canvases. Dum Dum’s hat flies off in the scuffle, skittering across the polished ballroom floor. They come to a cautious detente eventually, Bucky’s knee pinning Dum Dum’s shoulder down and his free hand twisting her fist up behind her back. 

“Children,” Steve says, not without fondness. “Do try not to break any of the world-renowned masterpieces.” Bucky grins at her, wildly, and loosens the grip of her thighs, getting up off of Dum Dum. For one long moment, as Bucky and Dum Dum shove each other and argue over which crate to open next, she wishes she could just close them up there. Draw the massive doors closed and live off art and wine and the surreal joy of hot water and each other’s company. 

Leaning over an open crate across the room, Bucky whistles low and gestures Steve over. There’s a glint of gold as Bucky lifts out a frame, and Steve steps to her side. They’ve got all night, after all.


	12. Chapter 12

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> By the time they’re back to the farmhouse, Steve has solemnly thanked each of them for their hard work and griped at Bucky twice for shooting that fella that was going for her. Bucky doesn’t figure she’s actually angry, just a little put out that Bucky’s still finishing her fights. Somehow, Bucky can’t find it in her to be at all sorry.

In the morning, the package is picked up by a woman and two men who drive up the long, crushed-stone driveway in a rumbling Delage, cleaner than just about any vehicle they’ve seen in months. The woman wears a bottle-green coat and a pair of ballooning trousers; a veiled hat obscures the left side of her face as she meets Jacques at the door and murmurs the pass phrase. 

They’re musicians. “The Nazis do love music,” she says, in dry, accented English. The package they stow in a false-bottomed saxophone case. They don’t exchange names, but one of the men passes over a note as they leave that tells them, in French, that if they leave quickly they’ll meet an advantageous truck on the road to Pau.

It’d be safer to travel at night, but it only takes them a quick conversation to decide to follow the note’s advice. Sure enough, after an hour of walking Steve hears a vehicle coming and directs them off the road to crouch in the ditch, while Jacques keeps ambling along and tries to look harmless. 

The truck that turns the corner is ancient, rattling like a tin can and more rust than paint. Bucky watches it slow from the scope of her rifle, feeling Steve’s even breathing beside her, and keeps her sights on the driver, cursing the glare of the sun that obscures them from her view. Jacques tips his cap back a little, angles his neck up to talk to the driver, then exclaims out loud, meaning lost in the distance between them but the startled sound all too clear. Bucky nearly pulls the trigger right then, but then Jacques turns, gesticulates broadly to them, shouts — “Ça va, ça va!”

Bucky lowers her rifle an inch, looks over the stock to Steve with one eye. Steve shrugs, elaborately, says, “Guess that’s our ride,” and pushes herself to standing.

Jacques speaks in animated French to the driver who, it turns out, is a teenage girl, hair shoved up in a kerchief and too-big denim coveralls on. The bed of the truck has three meager-looking bales of hay half-covered by a worn green tarpaulin. Jacques introduces them to the girl — Yvette — who, Gabe translates, is his next-door neighbor’s daughter, whom he hasn’t seen since he started on missions in late 1940.

“And now she fights, too,” he says, proudly, first in French to Yvette and then English to the rest of them. He clutches fondly at her forearms, and Yvette seems a little overwhelmed by his affection. Bucky thinks she’s not sure she’d be much less effusive than Jacques if she saw any of their old neighbors again, anybody from home, and she’s been away less than two years.

They hunker down in the bed of the truck, obscured under the tarpaulin, as Yvette drives them to the rendezvous point for this stage of the mission. It’s half a day away on a straight shot, but she promises to know the back roads and the best ways to avoid checkpoints, which will add a couple more hours. She drives like a holy terror, quite frankly, and they’re bashed together very thoroughly by the time she screeches to a stop and bangs on the side of the bed to tell them it’s safe. The ground below their feet, when they jump out, is a dusty drive leading up to a farmhouse, whitewashed stone walls and sun-bleached green shutters, and the sun has made its way across the sky. Curls of ivy trail down from the upper windows. 

The door opens, a head ducking out, and of a sudden Jacques, next to Bucky, lets out a whoop and runs up to the door. A woman steps outside — takes two huge stumbling strides — and catches him up in her arms, the two of them clutching one another so hard they sway, a little, like it’s just the fierceness of their grasp that keeps them from tumbling over. When the rest of them get closer, Jacques is murmuring soft sounds and kissing her all over her face, her cheeks and chin wet with tears.

“I hope this is your wife,” Dum Dum says. Jacques says nothing for a long moment, just tucks his forehead up to hers and breathes deep. He’s crying a little, too, and beside her Bucky can hear Steve squelch a little sniffle. In the air between the two of them, Bucky’s hand spasms open, like it’s reaching out to Steve’s without her volition. When she looks over, sidelong, Steve grins at her, toothsome and bright, eyes shining a little. Bucky wants to clutch onto her and hold tight, to keep her in the circle of her arms forever; instead she scuffs one foot in the dirt and smiles at the ground, knowing Steve’ll see it, and waits for Jacques to pull away and properly introduce them.

She is, of course, his wife — Eulalie — and they’re soon enough joined by her sister, Charlotte, and Mrs. Carmouche who owns the little farmhouse and its plot of land. The team is ushered inside with quick gestures and even quicker French chatter, far too fast for Bucky’s rudimentary vocabulary to follow. Gabe nods along, answers back in short phrases, but even Steve listens with her brow drawn tight together, not quite following. Once inside the kitchen, they shuffle to fit around a long, age-scarred wooden trestle table under Mrs. Carmouche’s translated directions, and watch, a bit helpless, as she pulls out a jug of fresh milk and two hearty loaves of brown bread. 

Bucky doesn’t even know where they get the ingredients, or the cow, but when Mrs. Carmouche opens a crock and places it in her hands, with delicate pride, any scruples she had about refusing her generosity fly away. Inside there’s a mound of creamy yellow butter, sprinkled with grey flakes of salt, and Bucky’s mouth waters just spreading a sliver across the slice of bread that’s been passed down the table to her. 

The kitchen quiets as they eat, fat slices washed down with milk still udder-warm, and it’s nothing at all like aged wine and the warm glow of marble they’d had just the night before, but maybe better. In the corner, Eulalie nearly sits on Jacques’s lap, face all flushed up and eyes still a little watery. Back before, in the compound, Jacques had told them about Eulalie, how they’d met at school, how she was smarter than him by a long mile, how they’d wed in the springtime with the smell of lilacs in the air and blooms wreathing her head. As he eats, he keeps one hand tucked against her waist. 

On their side of the bench, Yvette is crowded between Bucky and Steve, and between gulping mouthfuls she asks Steve questions that she usually has to repeat at least once before Steve fully understands her. Bucky catches bits, words here and there, and at one point hears Yvette repeat Steve’s name, drawing out the middle vowel with an upturned question to her voice. 

“Yes,” Charlotte chimes in from Steve’s other side, “is Steve a common name for American girls?” Bucky leans in on one elbow, watching the way Steve laughs and looks down at the plate in front of her.

“It’s Siobhan, actually,” she says. “After my grandmother.”

“Why Steve, though?” Dum Dum wonders, like he’s thinking it for the first time.

Steve looks up at Dum Dum, frowns. The whole table perks up, interest piqued. Bucky takes a too-big bite of her bread. “I don’t actually remember,” Steve says, cocking her head. “I’m sure it’s Bucky’s fault.”

“Damned rotten lies, Rogers,” Bucky says, around the mouthful. “And I can’t believe you don’t remember.” Steve wrinkles her nose. She still has a smudge of dirt across her cheeks, but her hair is clean and golden, like bright straw. Bucky considers making up some embarrassing story, just to see her go red. She can still blush, no matter how the rest of her body works now, still flushes up pretty in her cheeks, red splotches all down her neck.

Steve leans her chin on one hand, pensive. “I remember your Ma hated it, when we were little. Mine didn’t use it, never did, but didn’t much care.” Sarah had always used her full name — _Siobhan Grace, don’t you be late_ — and when Steve was over at Bucky’s house, Ma would always use it, too, and pointedly. 

“It was Miriam,” Bucky says, and Steve’s eyes brighten as the memory comes back. “She was tiny when we met, barely had her teeth in, and couldn’t say your name at all.”

“That’s right — it didn’t even sound like Steve when she said it, either, but that was about the closest thing to a real name that she could say.” She smiles down at her hands. Bucky figures she’s probably feeling the same sort of ache in her chest right now, the tightness of home. Steve translates to Yvette, gesturing to Bucky on _sa petite soeur,_ soft little smile still in place. Then to Bucky, again: “Did she tell ya about her boxing?”

“What?”

Steve’s shit-eating grin could split her face in half. “Beat up enough bullies to get your Dad to take her down to the gym.”

“Fucking hell.” Bucky says, then claps her mouth closed and looks apologetically at Mrs. Carmouche. Jacques is translating to her, clearly adding a bit of commentary, and she just tuts with a little smile in place. She’s not much older than Bucky’s Ma, creases in the corners of her eyes but fine brown hair only just shot with silver, and Bucky gathers she’s seen far worse than a cursing American soldier, holding onto this little farm in the middle of occupied territory. 

So Bucky glares at Steve, then says to the rest of them, “The number of people who still think it’s me that’s a bad influence on this one, for goodness sake.”

“The way Rogers tells it, you taught her to fight,” Gabe says, and Bucky fixes her glare a little harder on Steve, who covers her mouth politely on a cough that sounds more like a laugh.

“I taught her to _box,_ ” she corrects. “Steve came out of the womb fighting.” Gabe laughs, long and hearty, before translating to Yvette, who perks up and asks something excitedly back. 

“Oui,” he says to her, “I bet he would.” To Bucky, he says, “she wants you to teach her to box, too.” Bucky groans, drops her head to her hands. Yvette beams up at her, looking far younger than she had when driving the truck — she _is_ maybe Miriam’s age. Bucky had learned far earlier, and just for the rush of it; she didn’t even have the excuse of working for a dangerous and secret resistance network. 

“Sure,” she says, tipping one shoulder up. Yvette’s grin lights up, and she pushes away from the table, half-tumbling off the bench, apparently ready for lessons to begin right away. 

They won’t start on their mission until dusk, and Bucky sees the way Jacques quietly takes Eulalie’s hand and leads her toward the staircase, so she follows Yvette out to the yard happily enough. After Mrs. Carmouche slaps away every hand that tries to help clear the table, the rest follow, settling into the scuffed dirt of the yard, leaning against the sun-warmed stone of the kitchen garden walls. 

“Okay,” Bucky says to Yvette, standing across from her in the slanting late afternoon sun. “Keep your hands up —” she holds her own up, showing Yvette what to do, and Yvette copies her, eyes narrowed intently. “Good. Soft, now. Hands loose, thumbs out.” She reaches out and rearranges Yvette’s too-tight fist; Yvette watches closely, then looks up brightly once she’s got it, and though she looks nothing like Steve at all, square-chinned and auburn-haired, the gesture pulls at Bucky from across the years. She swallows, says, “Good,” again, then bats one hand at Yvette’s left fist to show her how to keep it up.

They circle around a little, Yvette blocking Bucky’s soft hits at first, then throwing a few of her own. Her chest is heaving and her face flushed up bright when Bucky figures it’s time to call it quits; when Yvette lowers her arms, there’s a little tremble in her hands, but the panting grin on her face stays on unabated. 

“She wear you out?” Jim says, pushing himself to his feet. 

Bucky grins, rolls her shoulders, says, “Nah. You wanna take your chances?” He drops his jacket in the dirt, lifts his hands. They don’t have gloves or even wraps, but it’s all in good fun. It’s not the first time they’ve scuffled; Jim has stories of a gym back in Fresno that sounds just like her dad’s and just as many neighborhood prizes to his name. It feels good to spar like this; back home, she stopped being a novelty and started being a threat sometime around seventeen, with a string of wins to her name and a reputation that left fellas backing away from losing to a girl. 

Behind her, she can hear Dum Dum and Monty exchange bets; they fight to five hits, torso only, and Bucky’s won two out of the last three bouts, spread out over weeks. Steve never bets, just watches Bucky with soft, amused eyes, and sometimes kisses her knuckles later on. 

Today, Jim gets in a good undercut to her ribs and a glancing blow off her elbow before she manages to pop him up under the arm and then in the gut, one-two. They circle, tease each other a little, enjoy the feeling of sun baking the backs of their bare necks. In the end, Bucky gets in the last hit, five to his four, and crows with victory as she thrusts her hands toward the sky. “Anyone to challenge the victor?” she says. Jim rolls his eyes elaborately and sprawls on the ground, catching his breath. “No one?”

“Yeah, alright,” Steve says, standing up. Bucky licks her lips, watches the way Steve’s grin spreads slow as she cracks her knuckles, walking up to Bucky. They haven’t boxed together in years, not since Steve stopped coming to the gym, haven’t so much as thrown a single punch in the months they’ve been in Europe together. 

Steve steps up to the space in front of Bucky, shaking out her shoulders and neck, making a real show of it. Feigning impatience, Bucky shifts her weight back, crossing her arms over her chest. “About done, Rogers?” Smiling at her placidly, Steve lifts her arms above her head, stretches, pulling her blouse taut against her stomach. Bucky swallows, sees the satisfied gleam in Steve’s eye, and uncrosses her arms. “Yeah, alright, let’s see if you still remember anything I taught you,” she says, lifting her hands.

Steve lifts her fists, bends her knees. She has good form, picked that up right quick when Bucky started teaching her. Bucky steps to one side, then the other, making a show of inspecting her posture. Steve rolls her eyes, doesn’t move; she’s always been good at holding her ground, too. 

“Get to it!” Gabe shouts from the sidelines. Bucky grins at him, where he’s lazing on the ground, feet kicked out and one hand propped in the dirt behind him. This is familiar, too, having an audience — the guys at the gym always liked to gather when someone new showed up, shouting their varied, and often conflicting, advice. Mostly harmless, especially when she and Steve were little and something of an oddity. She’s about to quip something back when Steve’s fist catches her in the side and she stumbles sideways. 

Steve blinks at her, guilelessly, when she rights herself. “Fighting dirty, Rogers?”

“Not hardly,” Steve says, giving a sweet smile. “And that’s one to me.” She lifts her fists again, even while Bucky shakes her head.

Steve has learned some new moves since they last sparred, but Bucky’s been spending long hours in the trees watching her fight, too, so she can anticipate some of them. Steve’s pulling her punches, not quite gentle but certainly not using all the power she now has in her muscles, and that’s unfamiliar, too. Steve never wanted Bucky to be soft with her — even though Bucky always was, just a little — and so Steve herself never held back when they fought. Not as angry and scrappy as she’d get out in the back of an alley somewhere, sure, but she threw her punches with a sort of breathless tenacity when in the ring, single-minded and intent. 

So Bucky takes a couple little jabs, watches how Steve blocks each one, easily, and sees the way she carries her left hand a little lower, already used to having the shield slung over it. “You just gonna play around all day?” Steve says, twisting out of the way of her upper cut. 

“Just feeling you out,” Bucky says, a little caught up in the bright gleam of Steve’s grin. “You won’t be smiling for long,” she continues, and of course Steve’s grin grows even wider. Bucky throws a right hook to Steve’s left side, which Steve blocks with her forearm just as though she’s got the shield there on top of it. While her arm is still extended, Bucky follows with a sharp left-handed jab, just getting Steve’s unprotected stomach.

It’s a warm-up punch, not a combat punch, but it’s still harder than Bucky has ever hit Steve. With a grunt, Steve takes a rocking step back, eyes going wide. Her grin spreads, impossibly, wider, hungry and gleaming, and when she draws the tip of her tongue over her front teeth Bucky feels it like a hit to her own gut. She forgets to move for a minute, watching the glint of Steve’s teeth, but Steve doesn’t hit her again, just keeps watching her. “Goddamn,” Bucky says, under her breath, bringing a wicked little chuckle out of Steve, throaty and raw. 

“Not bad,” Steve says, finally, her voice full of all that gruff bravado Bucky’s known forever, and that she’s finally able to back up. 

“Fuck you,” Bucky says, amicably, and tosses off another couple of punches that Steve blocks or dodges easily. She really is damned fast.

Steve lands her second punch to Bucky’s gut when Bucky’s too slow recovering after blocking a jab to her left side, and dances back two steps, grinning. “Getting slow, Barnes,” she says. Jim whistles; Bucky resists shooting him an unimpressed look, knowing better than to pull her gaze away from Steve’s smirking face.

“Don’t encourage her,” she says instead, and Jim laughs.

“It’s fun to watch you get beat, is all,” he says, and she doesn’t have to look at him to know he’s smirking. 

They trade the next two, Bucky getting Steve in the side while spinning away from her right hook, Steve retaliating with a bruiser up under her arm. And then Bucky mouths off, “You still holding back, or is this all you got without the shield?” and barely catches the narrow-eyed glint in Steve’s glare before Steve is on her, landing two quick blows before Bucky quite realizes. It’s grim satisfaction that the last one glances off the elbow she throws in to protect herself before landing on her ribs. 

Steve pulls back, eyes a little wide, chest barely heaving, pink all up her neck and cheeks. Bucky wants to haul her close and just — just consume her, just push hard and feel all that strength shove back. Instead she wrenches her gaze away, wipes her mouth, laughs a little. She turns to look at the guys; Dum Dum and Monty are both sourly handing over banknotes to the other three.

“Thanks for the faith, boys,” she says, tipping one shoulder up.

“Oh, no,” Monty says, tucking his wallet away. “We both thought Cap would let you win.” Bucky knows the squawk that she lets out is far from dignified, but it’s beat by the positive crow Steve laughs. 

Coming up behind her, Steve tosses one arm around Bucky’s neck. She smells sweet, only a little fresh sweat overlaying the floral soap from the night before. Bucky makes a show of shoving at her; Steve holds on tighter. “I probably should have,” she says. “Buck let me win plenty when we were little.” 

“You hated it every time,” Bucky says. Steve laughs, nose close to Bucky’s ear. Bucky would have hated it, too, if Steve had held back even more. She thinks she knows what Steve’s capable of, and while she’s keeping up so far, there’s not a part of her that doesn’t know that if push came to it, Steve could do more damage than any of them there, with shield or fists at least, if not with a gun. She hopes Steve doesn’t ever have to go to that place, doesn’t have to take herself that far. 

++

As dusk starts to creep in, they gather at the kitchen table once more, this time spread with a map of the region and a sheaf of onionskin paper covered in code. Eulalie traces her fingertip along the train tracks, dropping a button to mark the sabotage point. The cell’s last explosive expert had been shot in a mission three months ago, his gear left behind in Mrs. Carmouche’s rickety barn, and Jacques had rubbed his hands together gleefully at the sight and immediately settled in to construct the device they’ll use to blow the tracks. In the Netherlands, they’d been operating much more quietly, and he’s been bemoaning the lack of explosives for weeks.

Yvette’s banished to the attic while they plan, despite her significant protests. When her stomps finally recede up the stairs, Charlotte shrugs. “There has to be a line somewhere,” she says. Beyond Eulalie and Charlotte, Bucky’s not really certain of how — if — the women are related, but Charlotte treats Yvette with the indulgence of an older sister and the sternness of a mother all at once. 

“There are some things in which children should not be involved,” Monty says.

Charlotte shakes her head. “It is not about about innocence,” she says, looking at the staircase. “The things — when we found Yvette, she and her sister had been working on their own. They would — Isabella was very pretty, you see, and she would flirt with the soldiers at the cafe where she worked, convince them to meet her later. In the woods. Yvette would wait with the knife.”

Beside Bucky, Steve inhales sharply. “How many?” Bucky says. 

Charlotte lifts one shoulder, face grim. “Five or six. She hasn’t told me, exactly. The last one came early. Isabella was already dead when Yvette arrived.”

There’s a long beat of silence at the table. Bucky doesn’t want to picture it, doesn’t want to think at all of what two girls waiting in the woods to kill would look like, but she does, and it’s Susanna and Miriam she sees. 

Steve presses her whole arm against Bucky’s side, and says, a bit miserably but determined, “Let’s get some of those bastards tonight.”

Blowing up railways is familiar enough to them now, but it’s more complicated than just that today. The train they’ll intercept is small but well-armed, and the rumor is that it carries with it a sheaf of Hydra mechanical plans that the Red Skull is very eager to get in his hands. If they want to intercept those plans, there’s no way to be stealthy about it: the whole train has got to go.

As darkness drops, they make their way quietly through the woods until they meet the rest of the cell, a hard-edged group of three men and four women waiting silently near the border of the trees. No introductions are exchanged, just a terse confirmation of instructions and roles, communicated half in whisper and half through gesture. Jacques and Monty sneak up first, to lay the charges on the rail lines; the detonation needs to be timed precisely, to hit the engine, so they mark the spot with a dab of phosphorescent paint, something Howard cooked up then discarded, as the glow doesn’t last very long. Long enough for their needs, though.

Steve will go in the first team, with Gabe, Dum Dum, and two of the women from the cell, and the rest break off into two teams to come in a second wave, to the side and rear of the train. There’s not enough light for Bucky to work long-range, so she heads up one team, with Charlotte, Eulalie, and Jim. 

Jacques and Monty have barely settled on their bellies in the long grassy expanse between the tracks and the woods, detonator primed, when Bucky hears the first rumble. She gestures to Steve, who’s also noticed, and they signal everyone to be ready to move.

The train comes into view. It’s a perfectly ordinary steamer train, an engine and a dozen or so train cars, except it’s been painted blackout dark and no lights emanate from the front or windows. Bucky finds she’s holding her breath as they watch it round the corner and chug closer — closer — closer — 

Even after these long months, Bucky flinches away from the explosion involuntarily, then forces herself to look back. It’s hit perfectly; the front of the engine blasted off, the rest of the mangled mess blown sideways, off the tracks. The screeching noise of the still-moving rear cars grinding along the tracks is deafening. Steve signals her group up and off; as they run across the field, the front of the train tips over and finally it comes to a halt. Steve slams her shield into the passenger door of one of the cars, busting it open and throwing herself inside. At that, the other two teams follow, Bucky leading hers to take up the rear of the train. 

Inside the train, the German soldiers are dazed and slow to respond; Bucky picks off three before they even start to shoot back. Each team is to clear a portion of the train, searching for the dossier with the weapons plans. They have no idea what it looks like or who carries it, so strategy has been reduced to shooting everyone and snagging whatever paperwork they can find as they go. 

Bucky takes point, busting through the connecting door with a spray of gunfire with Eulalie on her four o’clock while Jim and Charlotte shove through the detritus to see if they can find anything. It seems to be mostly grunts in the rear three carriages, and they bust through to the fourth only to meet Steve’s team working its way rear-ward. Steve’s busy punching every soldier within reach; it looks like she’s flung the shield somewhere and hasn’t yet picked it up. Bucky’s about to shout something to her when she notices one of the soldiers Steve’s hit lifting a pistol and aiming right at Steve’s tightly whirling figure, confined in the narrow aisle of the carriage. 

She takes aim on pure instinct, pulls off three shots quickly — two more than needed to down him. Steve smashes one last guy’s nose and glares at her.

“I was handling myself,” she says, peevishly. 

“Sure,” Bucky says. “Find the plans yet?” Behind her, Gabe holds up a long tube, waggles it back and forth. 

“Just taking out the rest of the garbage,” he says, nudging a Hydra soldier with his toe. The man groans, faintly, but doesn’t move. 

“All clear that way,” Jim says, jerking his hand toward the rear of the train. “What do you say we clear out? Get an ice cream, maybe? Hotdogs?” He gives Steve a bright-eyed grin; she doesn’t look impressed. Jim instead looks to Bucky. “Malts? Egg cremes?”

Bucky claps his shoulder, says, “If you can find a chocolate milkshake, I wouldn’t say no.”

Making their way out of the train, the three groups meet back up and divvy out the spoils. The SSR wants anything related to Hydra weaponry, but one of the officers carried with him a sheaf of letters about local movements of troops that will be more use to the Resistance; Steve, Gabe, and one of the men in the other group shuffle through everything quickly, dim flashlight giving them enough light to read by, before stowing their respective papers and shaking hands. The Resistance cell seven melt off into the woods, vanishing easily, and the rest of them start to troop back toward Mrs. Carmouche’s, taking a circuitous route through the woods that only Eulalie seems to fully know just in case anyone tries to track them later. 

By the time they’re back to the farmhouse, Steve has solemnly thanked each of them for their hard work and griped at Bucky twice for shooting that fella that was going for her. Bucky doesn’t figure she’s actually angry, just a little put out that Bucky’s still finishing her fights. Somehow, Bucky can’t find it in her to be at all sorry.

“Goddamn,” Jim says, slinging off his rifle and propping it against the door frame just inside the kitchen. “I’ve never met someone so fucking ungrateful to have their life saved.”

“I was doing fine,” Steve says, peevishly. In the light of the kitchen, Bucky notices the vivid red slash on Steve’s arm that stands out against her bare skin, revealed by a rip in her suit. The bleeding has already stopped. Steve’s looking at the torn sleeve of her uniform with more annoyance than she directs to the knife wound, and Bucky scrounges up a rag, spits on it, and rubs it vigorously against the wound. Healing already. “That’s disgusting,” Steve says to her.

“At least I’m not pissing on it,” she says mildly, and behind her Dum Dum grunts in annoyance. He maintains that it works, though they all continue to not take him up on it.

“You’re wrong, anyway,” says Gabe. “Bucky cursed us out a whole hell of a lot more that time with the guard.”

Jim makes a face, considering. “You’re right. Goddamned ungrateful sons-of-bitches, both of you.” He waggles his finger at the pair of them. Jacques makes a sound that can only be agreement and Eulalie snorts, amused. Bucky shoots a narrow-eyed glare at the pair of them.

“What time with the guard?” Steve says. Bucky hasn’t told her — doesn’t tell her much of their time in the weapons factory. In the quiet of the night, or the few times they can snatch private conversation, it comes out too fraught, any time she tries, too full of the things she can’t put words to. Now, she lets the fellas tell the story while she threads a needle and sets it to the slash in Steve’s uniform. It’ll be easy enough to stitch while she’s stood there.

“Bucky was nearly dead on her feet with pneumonia,” Monty starts, taking some of the detonator gear from Jacques and stripping it down into parts. 

“What.” Steve says, coolly. She’s turning away from Bucky’s hands and glaring at her before Bucky can even stop seeing to the torn shoulder of her uniform, tugging the thread right out of the needle’s eye.

Bucky holds the needle up, says, “Stand still,” and then, “it wasn’t a big deal.” It wasn’t, really: once they were back at camp and she had some food in her, as near to real food as they get at the front, it’d cleared. Her lungs are fine, now, expansive and clear. Steve narrows her eyes, but holds her arm back out.

“We were at the end of a shift when one of the guards took Bucky to a back room,” Jim continues, and Steve says, “ _What_ ,” again, with more emphasis. Bucky knows what she’s thinking, what she’s worried about, because they’ve both heard enough half-whispered cautionary tales about what happens when a man wants to be alone. 

“Nah, it was fine,” Bucky says, petting at Steve’s shoulder like that will get her hackles down. “He just wanted a suckjob to get me off work duty.”

Jim snorts, just as Dum Dum says, “What?” and Steve turns her head and says, “From _you_?” incredulously. 

“You didn’t tell us that’s what happened,” Dum Dum says.

Bucky smacks Steve’s arm and says, “He’s not the first fella to ask,” and then to Dum Dum, “Would ya have done something different?”

Dum Dum shrugs, clearly still a little puzzled. “Hit him harder, maybe.” 

“So he leans in, right, and I butt him right in the nose, and I’m punching him, and I’ve got him on the ropes,” Bucky says, finishing up the mend and pausing to bite off the tail of the thread, “when these assholes barge in, like I needed their goddamn help.”

“You are right,” Dernier says to Gabe. “Sarge is much worse.”

“What’d you do to him?” Steve asks, patting at her arm like she’s checking Bucky’s work. Bucky swats her hand away.

“Killed him, what do you think?”

“Stuffed him in a crate shipping off to Berlin,” Dum Dum says, with no small amount of satisfaction. 

“Good riddance,” Charlotte says, lifting her hand to Bucky like she’s toasting. Thankfully, before Steve can further regale her with all the reasons it’s _different_ when Bucky steps in to finish Steve’s fights now than it was before — not that Steve liked it a lick back then, either — Yvette jumps down the last couple of stairs and starts up a demanding stream of questions, and they all shove back in at the table to clean their gear and analyze the success of the mission before bed.

++

“Is this what you thought it would be like?”

“Hmm?” The full moon slices through the narrow attic window, cleaving Steve’s face into a sharp dark and light divide where she looks up at the peaked ceiling. Her hands are tucked up under her head, coverlet pulled up to her waist. Bucky thinks Mrs. Carmouche had been on the verge of offering Steve the master bedroom — her own, and her late husband’s — when Jacques had said something in an undertone and the two of them had been ushered up to the little attic room, where two narrow beds are shoved up under the eaves. It’s clearly Yvette’s room, who’s been moved to a sofa in the sitting room. Bucky’s not sure if it’s a kindness, giving them a privacy that mightn’t have been quite so proper otherwise, or a teasing joke. At any rate, it’s so like Bucky’s little room back in Brooklyn that for a moment, she thinks that if she reaches across the space between the beds and grabs Steve’s hand, it will be small and cool, like when they were kids and spent nights up in that room spinning out stories. 

“The Resistance work,” Steve clarifies. “Or, I guess, the whole thing of it. You hear so much about the Front. I didn’t really know this part of the war existed.”

“We’ve been at it for months. You still surprised?”

“Nah,” Steve rolls her head on the pillow so that she can look at Bucky, casting her whole face into shadow. “I’m just thinking, you know. It’s been this way for years, for them. Can you imagine, if it were Brooklyn?”

“I don’t even want to think,” Bucky says, because of course that’s all she’s been thinking about — if it were her Ma and Dad and sisters scrambling to fight and keep themselves safe. She knows, too, that they might not have even had the chance to try, if they lived here.

“Yeah,” Steve says, quietly. Bucky feels a soft little tug in her stomach. They’re all the family Steve has left, too, and Steve’s also here fighting, even though of anyone she had plenty of reasons not to. Bucky does reach out, then, and waits until Steve extends her hand so they can grasp them together, one short, hard squeeze before they let themselves drift off to sleep facing each other.

++

In the morning, they come down the stairs to the wafting scent of frying potatoes and beans; Bucky’s stomach rumbles happily at the smell. When they get to the kitchen, the table is empty but for a single figure, who looks up at their arrival and smiles brightly.

“Peggy!” Steve cries, and swings her arms around her from behind, nearly pulling Carter off the bench in her enthusiasm. Carter turns her head, grins at Steve, and Bucky’s stomach twists up. 

“Carter,” she says, sitting at the bench across from her and spreading her hands on the tabletop. “Vacationing?” 

“Nazi territory is beautiful this time of year,” Carter deadpans. Steve falls into the seat next to her, smile still pulling at the corners of her mouth. Mrs. Carmouche drops a couple of plates in front of them; Steve looks up at her, guiltily, and makes to stand to help. Mrs. Carmouche waves her off, pushing a fork into her hand. Bucky keeps her eyes on Carter.

“I was passing through,” Carter says, after taking a few bites and murmuring her appreciation to Mrs. Carmouche in French. Bucky gives her own awkward _merci_ s — the food is good — but waits for Carter to say more. She’s too important an agent to just _pass through_. “Thought I’d say hi.” She smiles placidly; Bucky’s at least a little encouraged to see that Steve doesn’t believe her a bit either.

“You’re here to pick up the plans, aren’t you?” Steve says. If so, that means they’re not on their way back to England after this mission after all. Carter shrugs, managing to look a little apologetic. Bucky doesn’t much mind, figures Steve’s not too disappointed either. England’s fine, good for a rest and restock, but this is the first mission they’ve had that actually relates to Hydra in months, and Bucky’s not ready to give up chasing after whatever leads it gives them.

“I’ve something new for you, too,” she says.

“New mission?” Carter nods, takes a final bite of her beans, pushes her plate away. It seems to signal something, because Mrs. Carmouche leans around her to take the plate, and pats her on the shoulder with a nod before depositing the plate in the sink and leaving the room. 

“You’ve seen the name Strucker on some of the things you’ve come across?” Peggy asks. They both nod — Baron von Strucker seems to be something of a liaison for Hydra, a go-between for Red Skull and the Party. It’s unclear what other roles he plays, but he’s important enough. “We have intelligence that he will be traveling for a meeting with the Comte de Ivry at the Comte’s winter home in the Petit Pyrenees. He travels with a squad of well-trained Hydra guards, but this is the nearest we’ve been to him in months, and Chateau Gudane is less protected than Strucker’s usual Hydra compounds. It affords certain — opportunities.” She’s looking at Bucky, not Steve, which tells Bucky all she needs to know about what those opportunities are. Does an assassination count the same as a life taken in battle, she wonders.

“You want us to take the convoy, capture him?” Steve says.

“No,” Carter says. “I want to borrow Sergeant Barnes.”

A beat, and then Steve understands. “No,” she says.

“Steve —”

“With respect, Peggy, that’s not how we operate.”

Carter draws in a breath through her nose, like she’s summoning patience. “It’s not up to you to decide,” Carter says. “This will be the third time we’ve tried, and it’s a better opportunity than either of those times. We don’t want to capture him, Steve, we want him dead.”

“I get that, Peggy.” Steve looks grim, teeth gritted together, and Bucky wonders if she does really get it. Her shield is always her first option, even after a year in the field. “But we’re a team, that’s how you made us. You don’t get to just take Bucky away with you, that’s not how this works.”

“With respect, Steve,” Carter says, dryly, “Barnes is the one who holds the sniper rifle, so yes, I do.”

“Do I get an opinion?” Bucky says. Steve looks at her a little guiltily. Carter dips her chin, holds her palm out as though opening the floor. “I think you need to give us your intel, and let us figure out if a single shooter is the best option.” Carter looks annoyed already; she opens her mouth to respond, but Bucky cuts her off. “Not that we don’t trust your judgment. It’s just — we work better if we can figure it out ourselves.” That is true, in effect, though Bucky’s already decided that if Carter figures this is the best option, she’ll do it. She doesn’t need Steve at her shoulder for something like this. 

Carter lets out a sigh that says she is clearly indulging them, and says, “Fine.” In a few words, she sketches out the intelligence she has to hand about the landscape and layout of the Chateau, Strucker’s route, how he travels — number of cars, number of soldiers, pace, penchant to stop at scenic viewpoints or not — and the timeline the SSR has estimated. She is, unsurprisingly, absolutely right: while a full-scale ambush is also an option, it remains vital to preserve the anonymity of their team, making a single sniper ideal. By the time Carter finishes, Bucky is nodding along, tracing her fingertip along the map of the estate and envisioning elevations and possible viewpoints, and Steve’s face is pinched, arms crossed tightly over her chest.

“I still think we should be there as backup,” Steve says.

Bucky shakes her head, but Carter speaks first, “We can’t risk the staff or Strucker’s guards seeing you. A single man is much easier to hide.” One trained in sniper maneuvers, even more so. 

“Steve,” Bucky says, even as Steve makes a plaintive, dissenting noise. Dragging one hand over her eyes, Steve nods, clearly begrudgingly. 

“I don’t like it,” she says, and Carter says, “Noted,” not unkindly. 

Strucker plans to arrive that evening at Chateau Gudane, which barely gives them sufficient time to get Bucky into place. Carter gives Bucky fifteen minutes to pack up her gear and meet the ride that will drop her at the nearest town to the Chateau. The rest of the team will follow that evening to rendezvous near Verdun; on the chance that Bucky does get followed, she can’t risk leading anyone back to the farmhouse. 

She can’t bring herself to say any kind of goodbye as she leaves, just tips her chin at the fellas and says, “See ya soon.” She’s got her hand on the doorknob when Steve breaks, takes two strides and throws one arm around Bucky’s neck, bringing their cheeks hard together. 

Steve doesn’t say anything, but Bucky can feel her effort in holding back, so she turns her head enough to brush her lips over Steve’s cheekbone, and says, softly, “Soon.” Steve swallows and steps away, eyes a little bright. 

++

Carter’s map of the estate is precise, and Bucky finds a spot with near-excellent cover with little trouble. She’s not really surprised; Carter’s work is always impeccable, whether it’s code-breaking, face-breaking, or, as it turns out, assassination-planning. Bucky’s game enough to admit that if her stomach didn’t twist up a little bit every time Steve looked at Carter, she’d be a little in love with her herself. 

Chateau Gudane is nestled in the Petit Pyrenees, old enough to have been built in a time before expanses of manicured gardens — with no sniper coverage to speak of — became popular. In this part of the forest, the ground rises in sharp rock faces then just as quickly quells to narrow green meadows, and through it all winds a narrow dirt road leading up to the chateau, old tire tracks scored into the hard-packed surface. Bucky moves quietly in the ditch along the road, noting every possible escape route. It twists and curves here, teasing glimpses of the road ahead, and small paths fork off into the woods. De Ivry must be a man who likes his sport, for here in the park surrounding the Chateau, the woods are young and cultivated, nothing like the settled age of the forests they’d passed through after escaping the compound. The trees grow up straight and strong, which means less visual cover, but the ground holds little of the treacherous underbrush of more ancient forests to hinder movement. If she’s not shot or captured, she should get out just fine.

The road takes another twist, and then she’s upon the main entrance to the estate. While grand, the entrance is barely fortified: a pleasure palace, not a stronghold, and it emerges from the woods like Venus from a scallop shell, naked and dramatic. Bucky isn’t lulled; she knows her myth, and Venus is never defenseless against the intrusions of man.

She shakes her head, pushing away the fanciful allegories. If they’d stayed much longer in the shadow of all the treasures of the Louvre, maybe she’d have started speaking in verse, too. 

Instead, she makes a circuit around the outskirts of the building, getting as near as she dares without breaking away from the cover of the woods. The hills of the cultivated park rise up around the Chateau like two cupped palms, which must seem cozy and rustic to the aristocratic inhabitants but gives Bucky prime choice of surveillance spots. She counts six soldiers, not terribly well trained, who patrol the grounds of the house with lackluster enthusiasm. 

Strucker will bring with him his own forces, Hydra men trained and carrying those deathly ray guns. All the more reason to strike before they get comfortable. She knocks up a blind in the woods overlooking the main gate with a good view of the gravel courtyard. She gives herself a good stretch before settling in, uncertain how long she’ll be immobile, and unwraps the biscuits and peanut bar from her day’s K-ration to carefully stack next to her, alongside a canteen of water. Her rifle stand is all set up, everything neat and tight. She settles in.

The best marksmen have a way of letting their minds quell, attention falling still and narrow on the inputs necessary for the task at hand: shifts in the wind, humidity, and light, movements in the surrounding area, the difference between the small, local sounds of life around them and the sounds that mean a target is near. In the moments before a fight, Bucky’s mind quiets, drawing down tight on the necessary sensory details, but there’s always a piece of it that lingers in concern, a strain of her attention falling on the other men of B Company, in her early days, and now on Steve and the team. Steve, mostly. Steve’s not here, and so she thinks of them all back at the farmhouse, of the route they’ll take to meet her, of the many and myriad dangers of Nazi-occupied France. 

A pile of leaves to Bucky’s left rustles. A small rodent — a mouse, probably, or a chipmunk. Bucky counts her breaths, becalms her mind, turns it away from the clinging press of Steve’s cheek against hers. One, two, three. 

She carries lots of numbers in her head, these days. Trajectory calculations — she’s not quite as quick as Lee was, but she’s getting there, and she hears his soft, low voice at times when she’s working out a difficult shot. _Half a degree south; winds at 13 miles per hour; distance 138 yards._ Her serial number — 32557038 — imprinted on a new set of tags. These ones are SSR-issued, and blank of everything but each person’s number and blood type. No H on this set, and though it’s not by her choice she feels the absence like a needling prick. The SSR really does not want them identified if captured, does not want Hydra or the Nazis or whoever the fuck to know their names, their next of kin, their hometowns, anything that could be used to break them down. 

The last set of numbers is a little harder to keep track of these days, fracturing and fragmenting across missions. She remembers that first mission out with Lee, the one that earned them both their Corporal’s chevrons, and the way her mind had, almost unbidden, notched off _one two three_ as the men fell. Sometimes, in their missions now, the soldiers come too fast for Bucky to count them individually. Sometimes she doesn’t actually kill them. Sometimes she wonders if the ones in explosions count, if she helped set it up. Sometimes she kills men because they’re heading for Steve, even if within the perimeters of the mission her attention should be elsewhere. 

Eighty-seven, she thinks. Eighty-seven lives, give or take, she thinks, and doesn’t laugh. Take, really; it’s not in her power to give life, but to take. 

She remembers a couple of the gunners from the 107th talking once, just mouthing off in the mud of the trenches, about the way the Howitzers plowed men down. _Like sweeping your hand across a chessboard,_ one of them had said, before getting razzed for knowing how to play chess. _You don’t even know how many_ , another had said. _Dozens_. Unlike the chess-player, his voice carried with it the haunted weight of those dozens, scraped dry and dull, and the men sitting nearby had shifted uncomfortably. 

Bucky’s Springfield shoots one bullet at a time, and at a quick pace Bucky can get off sixteen, seventeen shots a minute, running through her extended magazine every other minute if she’s shooting steadily. Nothing like a Howitzer. God only has our hands, so you’d best use them, she thinks. She can’t reconcile any of the gods she’s known with the fury that slams through her chest at times, with the precision of her gun. When her Ma told them stories of the Golem, she focused on the hope of its creators, on the protection it gave; now Bucky also remembers that the Golem was created, but was not human. That in the end, the Golem was always destroyed. 

She wonders how many of the men she’s met have lost their gods, how many men have been destroyed after losing their way.

As expected, she hears engines before she sees the first car. The rumbles reverberate through the hills as the convoy makes its way down the road, and Bucky pulls her eye to her scope, sharpens her gaze. Strucker is predictable — paranoid, really — and travels in his own private Daimler-Benz with an escort of three other nondescript cars, and his always travels in third position. The mission clears Bucky to take out as many of the accompanying soldiers as possible, so long as she gets Strucker. Through her scope, the courtyard is near enough that their movements will be easy to follow, fish in a barrel. Would be close enough to see the whites of their eyes, if they weren’t wearing those glossy black beetle helmets.

The first car comes into view around the bend, sleek black nose made dusty. It slows, approaching the gate; a hand gestures out the driver’s side window, and a man hustles down from the gatehouse to open up the broad wrought-iron gateway. The first car passes through. She ignores it, waits a long breath, then tracks the second car with her scope. It draws even with her, a car’s length left between each vehicle, and clears the gateway. Finally, behind it, Strucker’s Daimler, dark glossy green coat made murky by dust. It pulls in, comes to a stop, broad side facing Bucky like a gift.

She takes a breath, lets it out, watches through her scope as the late evening sun glints off the driver’s door handle as he opens it up and climbs out. Turning, he reaches one gloved hand for the rear door handle, cranks it, pulls the door open. Bucky’s mind settles; Baron Strucker sets one foot and then the other on the ground and stands. The air is sharp and clear, her trajectory true. She squeezes the trigger.

One clear shot, right through Strucker’s head. He never looked her way; she didn’t see the whites of his eyes.

There’s quick and sudden panic as Strucker’s body collapses. Bucky takes out the driver, who’s reaching for a sidearm, then focuses her attention on the soldiers who scramble into a loose formation, firing back. They’re protected enough that it takes a few well-aimed shots to take each one down, but it’s not long before she has five of them down and the final two cowering behind one of the bullet-pocked cars. 

She pauses, lets the air ring still for a few long breaths. Waits to see if the lull will lure the last two out. No one else has emerged from the chateau; the broad front door creaked open at one point then slammed back shut in the face of gunfire, which tells Bucky that either there are no soldiers inside or if there are, only ones with better self-preservation instincts. The last two Hydra men seem to have decided they’d rather live, too, and stay crouched behind the car.

Bucky pulls back a little, thinking of packing up and leaving, the main thrust of her assignment complete, when a flash of movement catches her eye. The side door of the Daimler, furthest from Bucky, creaks open cautiously. Swinging her scope in the direction of the door, Bucky narrows her eyes. She hadn’t even noticed another passenger. She sees, first, just a crown of straw-yellow hair as the passenger emerges from the car. They’re moving slowly, with caution or shock Bucky’s not sure, and they’re small, shorter than the car at its tallest point. Her stomach clenches up, hard; nothing in Carter’s briefing had said anything about a child.

She thinks, for a moment, that the person will make their way into the chateau, but then the figure turns, walks around the back of the car, stumbling. It’s a girl, Bucky sees, a young woman really — not a kid, thank god, but a woman with a nebulous cloud of blonde hair and a tailored white dress. The left side of her chest is splattered crimson; she holds her hands in front of her like she’s offering something up. When she lifts her face to the sky, Bucky sees shocked confusion scrawled across the lines of her face: trembling mouth, glassy eyes. Strucker’s wife is in her forties, and he has one teenage son; this is, perhaps, a mistress. She’s Steve’s age, probably, small-framed like she had been.

Across the still air, Bucky can hear one of the soldiers shout something in German to the woman. A warning, no doubt. She’s well in Bucky’s line of sight, standing still and staring up at the cloud-glazed sky like it will offer an answer, and the splatter of blood paints her heart with a target. Bucky’s finger slides over the trigger. The soldiers seem ready to wait her out, behind the protection of their massive-hulled car, but Bucky — all of the team — operates under blanket permission to kill or capture any Hydra agents or associates they come across. Bucky knows better than to think this woman an innocent. There are no innocents in this war.

Underneath her finger, the trigger is smooth; the bulk of her Springfield tucks against her ribs, familiar. She takes a deep breath, lets it out slowly, holds her body still. In her scope, the woman’s chest heaves. Her mouth is painted the same crimson as the blood, shocked open. Bucky lifts her trigger hand away, sits back on her heels. Her heart pounds in her throat. 

Silently, she packs up her gear, giving one last look to the courtyard before she leaves. The woman kneels on the stone drive, slumped forward, and Bucky can just see movement as the soldiers creep out, cautious in the long, bullet-less pause. She leaves them be, slinging her rifle across her back. Steve will be waiting for her.


	13. Chapter 13

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Steve smiles, a little grimly. “Not the first time I’ve been someone’s last choice,” she says. She doesn’t look at Bucky, not really, but Bucky’s watching her. 
> 
> Jim rolls his eyes, just a little. “They’re not orders, so much,” he admits. “They asked. I don’t really think they expect us to succeed.” 
> 
> “Not the first time that’s happened to us, either,” Bucky says, quietly.

_December, 1944, east of Ostroda, Poland_

Blood wells up on the palm of Steve’s hand. “Well, fuck,” she says, resisting the desire to kick the tent stake across the clearing. Beneath her feet, the ground is hard as granite, frozen up solid, and instead of putting up the tent, all she’s managed to do is bend the stake and bash a hole in her hand. Pulling out her trench knife, she squats and starts to bore into the ground. Her hands are actually cold — she wasn’t sure she could get cold anymore, but it seems that all it takes is two months of skirting the German front as winter rolls in, camping in forests that hold prehistoric secrets. 

Across the camp, Dum Dum curses a long, blue streak, then another tent stake skitters across the ground toward Steve’s feet. She doesn’t even berate him; they are starting to get low on unbroken stakes, though, so she tosses it into a pile with others waiting to be straightened back out. She’s resorted to tying the tent to the gnarled roots of a massive tree on one side and hoping the stakes on the other side will hold, haphazardly shoved into the frozen ground. They need the cover, one way or another, because the sky’s a murky grey, heavy with snow. 

Monty gets a fire going, eying up their stock of rations before picking a couple of tins to crack open. They’re not down to subsistence rations, not yet, but a week ago they’d cut down their collective meals by one ration kit. It’s been days since they’ve seen any game worth the effort, and anyway, they’ve long since figured out that there are many other folks in the area who need whatever can be trapped or shot a far sight more than they do. It’s been a long war, in these parts. 

Jim returns just as Monty starts dishing up half-platefuls and passing them around. He sets the case with the radio down carefully next to him as he sits, shaking his head at Steve’s hopeful eyebrow. They only radio to London HQ every third day, varying the times according to a complicated coded rota Peggy’d worked up, and don’t always get in contact. When they do, it seems like mission commands only come every few times; they’ve been chasing cold Hydra trails for months, and the SSR has lost two teams to the Nazis in as many weeks, so HQ is cautious, regrouping. In the meantime, the team skitters around the German front in the cold, sortieing when there’s a manageable group to fight and camping a different place each night. 

They eat quietly, a sullen cast in the air. Marching most of the day, on alert for German soldiers, has a way of wearing against the nerves. Steve’s not tired, not exactly, but there’s an irritation buzzing behind her eyes like the start of the migraines she used to get, and around the fire she can see the way annoyed restlessness tightens the lines of the men’s shoulders. Next to her, Bucky hunches over, eating too fast. Mrs. Barnes had hated that habit, but somehow Bucky had never quite grown out of eating like it wasn’t enough for her body. She finishes quickly and shoves up, rinsing her plate from her canteen, and says, “Gonna take a walk.” 

“Take your gun,” Steve says, and Bucky looks at her with a dull, unimpressed glare. Her sidearm’s still strapped to her hip, and she reaches for the Springfield. Steve doesn’t need to tell her, knows she doesn’t. Bucky doesn’t even say _yes, Ma_ , like she might, usually, just slings the rifle over her back and stalks away, boots crunching loudly on the dried, frozen leaves. Steve glares around the circle; no one makes a comment. It’s not like they’re fighting, not really — just the past couple of days they’ve been snippy together, exchanging little biting gibes that do nothing to loosen Steve’s snarled-tight nerves. 

“I’ll take first watch,” Gabe says. It’s already getting dark. Steve studies the map for a while in the dimming light, as though skating her eyes over the same wavy lines will give her some insight into the Germans’ next plan tonight, when it hasn’t yet in the weeks past. 

Bucky comes back sometime after Steve’s crawled into the tent, curling up in her own bedroll tight behind Steve. She reaches out, just enough to brush Bucky’s hip, and Bucky knocks their knuckles together before pulling her hand away. Steve listens to the careful, even tempo of Bucky’s breath for a long time. 

++

They keep moving through the forest for the next few days. A narrow dirt road runs serpentine through its center, and the Germans had been using it for supply runs until recently. It all just stopped up — the truck convoys, the tank tracks, the pounding footsteps of infantry — a couple weeks back, and they’re trying to see if there’s another route. It’s cold as shit, but at least moving around keeps them all warm. At night, she and Bucky curl up tight and close. They fuck sometimes, stifling their sounds out of courtesy to whoever’s on watch, but mostly just tuck in tight together. They don’t touch much, other than that. Underneath Steve’s skin, her nerves feel frayed, out of annoyance or frustration, she’s not sure. She does know she’s not the only one; of late they’ve all had to take some long, solitary walks out in the trees after sniping at one another turned harsh. It bothers Steve, letting the men go off on their own like that, but they’re well-armed and well-practiced, and she figures if any of them met a German brigade in the depths of the woods, they might come out just fine on sheer built-up furor alone. This is the longest they’ve gone without a proper fight since they started working together a year ago, and the rest of the men even more than Steve have grown used to bloodying their hands more regularly. 

It must be that coming out when Bucky stands after they eat and smacks a fist into her palm and says, “Alright, fellas, who’s up for a couple rounds?” Jim’s already gone off to a clearer spot to try the radio, but Dum Dum stands up, flipping his hat to Monty to hold onto. Bucky gets three hits in before he gets his first on her torso, and she laughs, delightedly, and dances away. “You got more than that, old man?” she taunts. There’s a bit of an edge to her voice, more than just a friendly taunt, and it’s enough to bring Dum Dum back in to try for another hit. Bucky’s much quicker, though, and once he’s close enough she lands her last two punches easily enough. 

The rest of the circle shakes their heads when Bucky lifts her hands for another contender. “Stevie?” she says, finally, not cajoling so much as challenging. They’ve sparred a bit more frequently in the past months, re-learning one another’s bodies and keeping their reflexes up, and Steve’s blood already sings for it. Setting her plate aside, she rolls to her feet, extravagantly shaking out her shoulders.

“I asked for a fight, not a show, sweetheart,” Bucky says, with bite to her voice. She only calls Steve _sweetheart_ when she’s teasing her. 

“Some of us can handle two things at once, dollface,” Steve says back, sickly-sweet, and gives a slow stretch. After a long moment, watching Bucky’s face narrow into impatience, Steve steps closer and lifts her hands. Their first punches go nowhere; they’re both of them quick, and have favored opening salvos. Steve takes Bucky’s one-two to the left bicep and right forearm, and Bucky blocks her initial punch easily with one shoulder. 

Steve can’t quite tell when things shift, but suddenly Bucky’s on her, too close to get in anything but a gut punch, and her fist lands with sharp accuracy, knocking Steve’s breath out of her. She pulls back, narrows her eyes, tries to read Bucky’s body. Her shoulders are pulled tight, chin down, and for one sudden, stricken moment Steve doesn’t recognize her at all. Then she moves, a half-step forward, and tilts her face up enough that Steve can read the drawn-in concentration of her brows, and know her again. It throws her off, though, and Bucky gets in another hit to her side, hard enough to bruise.

“Forget how to fight?” Bucky taunts, blocking Steve’s reflexive jab. “Maybe you shoulda stayed home after. Collected some scrap metal.” It stings, more than it should; Steve knows Bucky well enough to know she can get mean when she’s aching for a good fight. She hasn’t ever turned it on Steve, though, not really.

Steve says nothing in response, just tucks her elbows in tight, the way Bucky taught her, the way her body knows, and moves in to throw another punch. Bucky blocks it, easily, just as Steve intended, and just as Bucky bats her fist away, she rolls her left shoulder in, slams against Bucky’s unprotected chest, and hits her with the back of her fist. Bucky stumbles back, winded. Steve only has one long moment to savor the wide, surprised flare of her eyes before Bucky pulls back in tight, pummeling her with quick, tight jabs that glance off her crossed forearms. Steve steps back; Bucky follows. Every blow is Bucky’s, blocked off Steve’s forearms, her biceps, her shoulder. 

“ _Hit_ me,” Bucky hisses; Steve looks up, catches the dark glimmer to her eyes, and throws out a quick, perfunctory right hook. It glances off Bucky’s block easily enough. She gives another, and it nearly lands, popping Bucky’s elbow with a smack. “God _damn_ it,” Bucky grits out. “Stop fucking holding back!”

“No,” Steve says. Bucky’s strong, but she’s not — Steve’s never hit her at full strength, not since she got the serum, and she won’t. She won’t. 

“ _Hit me_ ,” Bucky says again, almost desperate, and comes in fast, getting an elbow to Steve’s ribcage and a knee to the back of her thigh, well against the rules she herself developed. Steve scrambles back, holds herself away from Bucky.

“ _No_ ,” she says again, and Bucky says, “Fucking _do it_ ,” and comes in hard and sharp again. Steve doesn’t — she won’t — she blocks and rolls away from Bucky, breathing harder now, and when she sees the snarl of Bucky’s mouth she almost steps away, almost stops it all, but Bucky says: “Stop being so goddamn noble,” like she’s spitting something, and something inside her tightens. 

One half-step in and she’s close enough to slam her elbow into Bucky’s forearm, causing a grunt of pain and a momentary window when she can land one — two — hard jabs to Bucky’s ribcage and gut. Bucky falls back, looks up at Steve with a flaring glance that’s so dark it’s almost hungry. Then she grins, wild and wet, and it’s enough to distract Steve so she doesn’t even catch the elbow Bucky throws to her sternum, the fist that follows it. 

She stumbles back. She can’t breathe. With one hand, she reaches out — her inhaler — before remembering that her lungs work now, when they haven’t been sucker-punched. Remembering is enough to free her up, and she takes a deep gasping breath and glares at Bucky. Something flits across Bucky’s face; it’s close enough to fear to be almost familiar, but it’s gone quickly as Bucky says, “I _told_ you. Stop holding back.”

Steve won’t hit her as hard as she’s asking, she won’t, but if Bucky thinks she’s doing it out of fucking nobility, then — Steve steps in again, thrusts her thigh up to throw Bucky’s hip off balance, brings one fist down on her shoulder. Before Bucky can block her, she pounds her left fist up, catching Bucky in the diaphragm.

Bucky gasps — Steve pulls back, bile rising up in her throat — Bucky coughs, then spits, then looks at her wild-eyed. It’s not hunger this time, it’s something Steve doesn’t know. Steve throws her hands up, steps back, says, “I’m done,” and turns on her heel, nearly running off into the woods.

No one follows her, and she has the sense to stop after barely a minute running, knowing that anyone could get turned around in these woods after dark. She leans over, hands on her knees. She’s not out of breath — her heart rate’s barely up — but her chest aches a little, anyway. She’s the leader here, it’s her job to notice when things are going too far, when someone on her team needs extra support. Bucky’s at her elbow, at her back, right there at her side; she’d never presume to know everything Bucky’s thinking, but she’d thought — 

That glint in Bucky’s eyes, it’s something Steve doesn’t know, or doesn’t want to know, but she’s seen it before. In a close fight, with blood on both their hands, she’s turned to see Bucky killing not like she has to but like she’s eager for it. There are a lot of reasons for it, Steve thinks, and Bucky’s been through so much. She’d hardly be the first good man to want revenge after something so — so enormous. 

Leaves rustle behind her. Steve’s got her gun drawn before she turns, but it’s Jim’s voice that says, “Cap? We’ve got orders.”

++

Seems a whole swath of the army and Peggy with it got itself trapped up near the Russian border, sieged in behind a mean Hydra blockade. Winter’s set in hard, and they’re running out of food. Monty and Dum Dum have a map spread between them by the time Steve follows Jim back, already sketching in possible lines of attack.

“They need someone to break the siege,” Jim says. “I think they’re getting desperate.” 

Steve smiles, a little grimly. “Not the first time I’ve been someone’s last choice,” she says. She doesn’t look at Bucky, not really, but Bucky’s watching her. 

Jim rolls his eyes, just a little. “They’re not orders, so much,” he admits. “They asked. I don’t really think they expect us to succeed.” 

“Not the first time that’s happened to us, either,” Bucky says, quietly. A little coldly. 

Gabe nods, bumps his shoulder against Bucky’s. “I love proving them wrong,” he says.

++

They solve the question of how they’ll get to the Russian border by solving another one of their problems, when they stumble across — and nearly over, in Bucky’s case — a ravine with a newly-cleared road snaking down its center.

“Guess this is where the trucks have been,” Gabe says, leaning to look down the precipice. Sure enough, in the distance they see a couple of black trucks drawing nearer. 

Steve hefts off her pack, pulls out a length of rope. “I don’t know about you boys, but I don’t feel like walking to Russia,” she says, securing one end of the rope around a tree.

It takes them a matter of minutes to secure two trucks and leave two more without key parts of their engines. They were empty, it seems, on their way out for supplies, and carrying only a driver and a lookout each. They leave the Germans trussed up in the back of the abandoned trucks, tight enough that they won’t get free until the team is well on its way, and set course north east.

++

It only takes a few minutes’ reconnaissance to tell that the Hydra siege owes much more to the insidious whims of weather and terrain than the soldiers’ own military expertise. The Allied camp huddles in a hazy clearing behind the Hydra trench, with a jagged ravine cutting a semi-circle around the other side, any egress points made impassible by sheets of ice remaining after days of blizzards. The air has only just started to clear, in fact, and in their approach they’d all, Steve included, been cursing the ice as they slipped and slid while working their way up the hill where they’ve found a vantage point. The single road that winds along the edge of the ravine is a mire of frozen mud, buffeted with thick drifts of snow. They’ve left the trucks a mile or so down the road and hiked in the rest of the way, and even with the heavy-tread tires it had been a struggle getting this far. 

Even with binoculars, the Allied camp seems far away, and impossibly small. HQ had estimated a thousand men, stranded there for weeks. Even though they outnumber the Hydra troops, the blockade currently obstructs the only exit point and is equipped with at least one heavy Granatawerfer mortar, pointed squarely at the meager camp. The cluster of tents seems impossibly fragile, some half-collapsed with the weight of snow-drifts, most looking a little ragged. Beyond a skeleton watch in the Allied trench, there are very few men outside. 

“Where are the goddamn Ruskies?” Jim bites out. 

“Fighting their own battles,” Gabe says, wearily. They’re near Stalingrad, which has suffered its own devastations; in the scheme of things, a couple battalions of Americans and Brits means very little. 

“We’re here,” Steve says. It looks grim, she’ll admit, but they _are_ there, and they carry hope with them, even when it’s offered from no other corners. 

“Yeah,” Gabe says. “Yeah, we are.” 

They work their way back down the hill toward the trucks, unconcerned with leaving tracks behind. In an hour, it won’t much matter either way. 

It takes Jacques a quarter of an hour underneath the hood of each truck to get them prepared. “You sure that will hold long enough for us to get there?” Steve asks.

Jacques shrugs. “Si la route n’est pas trop cahoteuse,” he answers. Steve looks skeptically at the stretch of mud and snow in front of them. 

“Yeah, alright,” she says. “Load up!”

Steve and Bucky hunker down in the back of the first truck, with Jacques in the driver’s seat, and the rest follow in the second. Steve can’t help but grit her teeth hard at every jolt and rattle, but the truck holds as they make their way up the road. In the dark, Bucky’s face is unreadable, drawn tight, but as the truck begins to slow she looks up at Steve and lifts one eyebrow. Steve cracks a tight smile in return and hefts her shield as Bucky tucks herself up against the side of the truck, slipping the barrel of her Springfield into the smallest crack between the bed of the truck and its waxed canvas cover. Her visibility must be terrible, but Bucky holds herself still and quiet nonetheless, as though she has no worries at all. 

Through the crack, Steve can just see the checkpoint up ahead, with a makeshift gate of barbed wire and three Hydra soldiers. Though their borrowed Hydra trucks have protected them this far, without uniforms, they have no hopes of being let through without a fuss. They’re well prepared for a fuss, though. As they slow, one of the soldiers hails them with a lifted hand, walking toward the truck. A loud crack, and he’s down; Bucky’s reloaded and hitting the second, then the third, within mere seconds. They had no time to call out in alarm.

Bucky takes a breath, sits back on her heels, and reloads the Springfield one more time before slinging it over her back. When she looks at Steve, her face is tight, blank, for one moment before her mouth ticks up in the corner. 

“Ready?” she asks, though really that’s Steve’s job. The truck starts to gain speed again, and they have only the barest moments. Steve nods, hefts her shield, and moves toward the back of the truck, forcing herself to narrow her mind to the plan. But it flits and skitters nonetheless, to the preternaturally quick way Bucky reloads, to the frozen-still brace of her shoulders. She’s seen the results of Bucky’s sharp eye and quick hands countless times, now, but always from a distance and in the middle of action; this is different.

Two knocks sound on the barrier between the cab and the bed — the signal. Steve takes one breath and jumps out the back, Bucky just behind her.

They just roll out of the way of the second truck, and have no time to watch the way the two trucks veer off, wildly, empty of their drivers and cargo, because the Hydra soldiers are already piling in. Handgun in one hand and shield in the other, Steve charges toward a group of soldiers, shooting a few before getting close enough to slam her shield into the unlucky bastard nearest her.

The Hydra troops come in waves, scrambling a little with the surprise of the attack but no less lethal. Steve flings her shield, bouncing it off two helmeted soldiers in a row, and Bucky catches it on the recoil, shoving it in front of her and charging toward the nearest group. Steve follows, dodging guns and using her fists; in front of her, Bucky turns, unholstering her second handgun as she tosses the shield back to Steve.

They’ve practiced a little, in their downtime, throwing the shield back and forth, ricocheting it off trees. Everyone on the team can handle it passably now, well enough to grab it and toss it back to Steve. Though Bucky manipulates it nearly as well as Steve, with an easy grace, she doesn’t like to keep hold of it for long in the heat of battle, preferring the grip of a gun. Nonetheless, Steve likes knowing that her shield is at Bucky’s call, just as Bucky’s guns have her back. 

Grasping it, Steve plunges forward. She’s locked in combat with a single soldier, his gun hooked over the edge of the shield, trying to wrench him sideways, when the first explosion hits, then the second. It knocks them all unsteady, and in the confusion Steve knocks the soldier over and brings the shield down on his neck, pulling back to face whoever approaches next. She can hear Bucky’s soft huff of laughter at the soldiers’ disorientation in the face of Jacques’s twin bombs, strapped into the engines of the trucks.

The troops come fewer now, running ragged and increasingly disorganized, as the team attacks from multiple directions. “The trench?” Steve shouts to Bucky, who nods and loops around to her. Just beyond the camp, the Hydra troops have dug a long trench, defended by both shotguns and and a well-manned mortar gun pointed directly at the answering trench on the Allied side. With the noise of the melee spreading across the long stretch between camps, soldiers in both trenches have started shooting, disorganized barrages bursting haphazardly across the lines. 

They need to take out the mortar before it can do damage to the very men they’re trying to save, so Steve draws Bucky close and pulls the shield up in front of them, protecting their torsos as they move forward as one. A couple of bullets ping off, increasing as they draw closer and more Hydra soldiers take notice of them and start to fire with panic. They’re just at the edge of the trench, a clear entry point as they’re on Hydra’s own side, when Steve looks at Bucky, who nods, and pulls the shield back.

Bucky starts shooting before the shield’s even off of her, taking out a pile of soldiers in the trench in front of them, and they both jump down, splitting up to fight their way down its length. 

There aren’t many men down there, though; they’ve manned it with a skeleton crew of scouts, keeping the bulk of the company on the road blockade. Halfway down Steve sees Jim and Dum Dum clearing out the last men with efficiency. She turns, making her way back toward the center, and just catches sight of Bucky doing the same when an explosion blows a crater into the gap of the trench between them.

“Bucky!” Steve charges forward before the dust clears, stumbling through the blasted-out ground. She can’t see — it’s all a gritty haze — dust drawn into her lungs with every breath — her throat raw on Bucky’s name — 

“Steve!” She hears Bucky’s voice just as she finds her arm, grasping and pulling their bodies close together. Bucky’s covered in dirt but unharmed, on her feet; Steve shoves their mouths together, hard and unheeding, and Bucky’s fingers grind into the vertebrae at the nape of her neck. Bucky pulls away first, still gripping Steve, then cups her cheek with a little smack and says, “Enough with the sentimentality, Rogers.” It doesn’t feel sentimental, not at all; Steve’s throat burns with bile and panic and dirt.

“We gotta take that gun out,” she says, bringing her mind forcefully back. Bucky nods, looking around the ruined trench. She finds a rough toehold in some of the shattered wooden supports, and Steve helps boost her up, high enough to see over the edge and plot out the gunners’ positions. 

“They’re well-covered,” she says as she drops back down. A second charge goes, and they both brace. This explosion sounds distantly, which must mean they’re shooting on the Allied camp now. She grimaces; Steve can feel her heart pound. “I can’t hit them from here; I’ll have to get closer. Or get them to swing sideways, expose their flank.”

“Okay,” Steve says, nodding. The blasted-out wall of the trench reaches up above her head by a couple of feet, but the same foothold Bucky used has held, and the shell also took out the protective fence built up along the edge of the trench. “You head down the trench and get closer — Dum Dum and Jim are down thataways, too.”

“What are you gonna do?” Bucky asks, as Steve slots her shield onto her back and approaches the wall. “Steve?”

“I’m gonna distract them,” she says, and scrambles upwards before Bucky can respond.

Rolling over the top of the trench, Steve can still hear Bucky’s protestations. “Go!” she hisses over the edge.

“God _damn_ it,” Bucky says, but she moves. 

Standing, Steve pulls the shield back down, securing it on her forearm, and lofts it high, like a target. She permits herself one tight swallow before sauntering forward, out into the stretch of unoccupied land between the two trenches. She fires just one shot toward the mortar, then calls out “Hey-o!” when she sees one of the gunners duck. Standing broadside, facing the gun, she gives them a little wave. A shot comes; she blocks it; another, then a quick hailstorm; she starts running, zig-zagging wildly across no-man’s-land. Her feet slip and twist on the slick, frozen ground, but she just has to keep moving until —

A shell lands at her feet. Diving to the side, she wrenches the shield up to cover her and braces for the explosion. It comes, deafening, carving out the ground below her so she’s falling, scrambling against the snow and dirt, to land in a smoking hole. Two deep breaths: her ribs ache. But if they’ve aimed toward her, it means they’ve left their broadside open, so she pulls herself to her feet and uses the edge of the shield to hoist herself out. Bullets fly as soon as she emerges, so she falls to a crouch, tucked behind the shield.

_C’mon, Bucky_ , she thinks, gritting her teeth against the onslaught. The tell-tale whistle of another mortar comes across the air, and she pulls herself in tighter, sending up an inchoate thought that might be a prayer. 

When it hits, the blast knocks her back, down into the crater of the earlier shell again, and something rips through the muscle of her thigh. Dirt and shrapnel rains down on her; she drags the shield up to cover her face and flexes her leg. It moves, still, so she pulls herself to her knees, leaning on the shield and taking a deep, debris-choked breath. The gash in her thigh bleeds, but it’s not gushing, so she shoves up to her feet and makes to climb out of the crater again. 

She peeks over the edge, but can’t see the mortar station in the dust of the explosion, so with a heave, she pulls herself up again and starts advancing. Her thigh aches with the effort, but for a few steps no bullets come and she dares to hope. She glances up over the shield; in the haze, she can just see the mortar, its barrel pointing toward the sky and wobbling a little, and feels a rush of triumph, running forward. 

As the air clears, she can see Bucky and Dum Dum climbing out of the trench, running toward the mortar, too. She pulls the shield to her side, and is about to call out when something slams into her gut, throwing her off-balance. 

She falls onto the shield, hand grasping for her abdomen, where the pain centers right above her right hip, flame-hot and boring in deep. She looks down at her hand: blood. 

Rolling off the shield, she gets to her knees, then shoves up on one foot, gritting her teeth to not fall forward. The heat of her own blood spills over her fingers. 

“Steve! Steve —” Bucky comes up on her left side, tucking up under the shield to grab Steve’s arm and help her. With her steadying hand and a couple of deep breaths, Steve can move forward.

“I’m good,” she says to Bucky. “Really. We gotta keep going.”

“You were hit,” Bucky says, taking more of Steve’s weight. It’s unnecessary, but Steve lets Bucky shove her shoulder up under her arm. Pulled tight together like this, the shield cups around Bucky’s shoulder, casts her face in shadows.

“The mortar’s down,” Bucky says, unnecessarily. “We’ve won.” 

“Oh,” Steve says. “Good.”

Bucky laughs, high and a little frantic. “Yeah it is, you jerk.” Her breath comes in hot, hard pants against Steve’s neck. “Don’t you fucking think we’re not going to talk about that stunt,” she says.

“Got the job done,” Steve says, looking sidelong at Bucky, who shakes her head.

“You fucking —” she starts, but stops, realizing at the same time as Steve that they’re now facing a line of Allied troops with their guns at the ready. 

They haven’t shot yet, though, so Steve pulls away from Bucky to lift her shield, star toward them, and shouts, “Americans! We’re Americans!”

“Et français!” Jacques shouts from somewhere behind her, sounding put out, with Monty’s, “And English, thank you very much,” coming as a disgruntled mutter. 

Steve and Bucky make their way across the field to meet up with the soldiers, Dum Dum and Monty at their flank. The soldiers are, to a man, gaunt-cheeked and pale, but exchange firm handshakes and slightly dazed shrugs. 

“You feel like helping us round up some prisoners?” Dum Dum asks, gathering a handful of men to head back to the blockade and secure any survivors. 

“Who’s in command?” Steve asks one Private, who blinks wide-eyed at her. 

“Well, I’ll be goddamned,” comes a familiar voice, answering her question, as a few men step aside to let Colonel Phillips through. He stops in front of Steve and Bucky, eyes them up. “You’ve made a liar of me, Rogers,” he says, frowning. “I told Carter I’d be happy never to see you lot again, and here I am, goddamn gleeful.” 

Steve wants to laugh; Bucky actually does, a little thin and breathless. “Sir,” Steve says, instead, and holds out her hand rather than saluting. He shakes it, giving her what could pass for a rueful smile. He’s spared expressing any further gratitude, though, by Peggy shoving her way through the crowd.

She’s out of breath, hair pulled back, looking a little raw around the edges. She comes to a stop at Phillips’s shoulder, a couple feet from Steve. “I told Command it was high time they sent me some proper company,” she says, looking Steve up and down. “I can’t imagine why they sent you.” Steve breaks first, coughing out a laugh and stepping forward to grip her in a tight hug. The move pulls at the ache in her abdomen, but she doesn’t let go for a long moment.

“You’re welcome,” she says, too soft to be pointed. Peggy answers with a smile, cool hand cupped around Steve’s cheek. It’s frigid out, their breath making foggy clouds. Peggy’s face is bare of makeup, pale and a little too thin. 

“Yes, yes,” she says, patting Steve’s cheek once more before pulling away, giving Bucky a warm smile and handshake. 

“This one’s got a hole in her leg,” Bucky says to Peggy. “Got a medic tent somewhere?”

“I’m fine,” Steve says. She can feel the flesh knitting back together in her thigh, and when she swipes her hand across the wound, the blood is dry. The one in her side will heal, too, though it’ll likely take a bit longer. 

“Like hell,” Bucky says, mildly, just as Peggy says, “I’ll take you to it.”

“No need —” Steve wriggles away from Bucky ineffectually; Bucky grabs a hold of her wrist and jerks it, hard, surprising Steve into stillness. “I’m not gonna use up whatever supplies we’ve got,” Steve says. Her flesh knits itself up just fine, and the men here need care far more than she does.

“We just opened up the supply route,” Bucky says, “we’ll have more in days.”

“We’re not so derelict as all that,” Peggy says, gesturing to them to follow her. With Bucky’s hand still on her wrist, Steve follows, though she gives Bucky a glare that goes ignored. 

In the medical tent, they are low on most basic supplies, but there are a couple of clean-pressed nurses bustling around, seeing to the few full beds or directing those with new injuries in to be treated. “We were on the march when we got socked in,” Peggy explains. “Then the first blizzard put a stop to the fighting. It’s mostly frostbite and ‘flu we’re dealing with here.” 

“If you’re calling us lazy, so help me god, Agent Carter,” a nurse says as she walks up to them, giving a searching glance over Steve and Bucky.

“Wouldn’t dream of it, Nurse Voight,” Peggy says, warmly. A little flicker of a smile tips up the corners of Nurse Voight’s mouth. 

“Well, then. You both hurt?”

Before Steve can say anything, Bucky answers, “Just this lunkhead.” Nurse Voight directs them to a cot, and Steve sits with as little stiffness as she can manage, handing her shield to Bucky.

“Lift your arm up,” Nurse Voight says, already leaning to look at the wound in Steve’s abdomen.

“Nah, it’s her leg,” Bucky says, pointing at the obvious wound on her thigh, the clotted blood and pale flesh under the wrenched-open tear of her suit.

Nurse Voight lifts one eyebrow and jerks her chin toward the wound in Steve’s side. Reluctantly, Steve lifts her arm away. She knew better than to hope Bucky would leave after seeing her to the medical tent; there’s not been once in the past decade and a half that Bucky’s left her alone when her body’s fighting against her.

Bucky drops the shield; it lands with clatter and rolls under the cot, but she ignores it as she leans close enough to see Steve’s side. It is already healing itself, Steve can feel it, but she can also feel the sluggish ooze of blood.

“Fuck, Steve, what the fuck,” Bucky says, reaching out with one hand to pull at the rip in her uniform. She ignores Nurse Voight’s protestations, tugging the tear larger, bringing a stinging rush of cold air that has Steve sucking in her breath.

“Um. I got hit,” Steve says. 

“Yeah, I fucking saw,” Bucky says. “I thought it was your leg.”

“That was — before,” Steve says. “It’s fine — I’m fine —”

“You have a _hole_ in your side,” Bucky says.

“Yeah, and —” Steve starts, and Nurse Voight speaks over her.

“Yes, and we’d like to patch it up, if you don’t mind, Sergeant.”

Bucky blinks, lifts her hands away. She rocks back on her heels, the illusion of stepping away, and if it weren’t for the way her worry and anger rolls off her shoulders in palpable waves, Steve would give her a glare. Instead, she unsnaps the top of her suit, wriggles out of it. The answering pull on the muscles of her abdomen sends sharp pains up her side, and she works very hard not to grimace. 

Steve unbuttons the wool shirt underneath and lifts her cotton undershirt up, out of the way. Underneath, the wound is a neat, dark hole, blood clotted and flesh pink around the edges, already trying to heal.

“This just happened?” Nurse Voight says, looking up at Steve.

“Um.” Steve glances at Peggy. This is the first time anyone other than Bucky has seen to her wounds, and given that her very existence in the structure of the Army is secret, she’s not sure what to say.

“Agent Rogers has accelerated healing,” Peggy says simply. “Experimental. Classified.”

“Huh.” Nurse Voight cleans the wound with gauze. “Alright.” She turns Steve slightly, palpates her back. “There’s no exit wound,” she says. “Unless that already healed, too?” she adds, drily.

Steve shakes her head. “No, I — I think the bullet’s still in there.” It’s familiar, now, the way her body heals: the pulled-tight feeling of tender flesh, the taut, tenuous knitting-together of shorn muscles, the over-warm sensation of pounding, healing blood. It’s been a little awry this time, aching where it would usually itch, and she thinks that might be why.

“Alright,” Nurse Voight says, taking it in stride. Steve likes her. “Lie down.” As Steve lies down on the cot, Bucky at her shoulder and Peggy leaning in to look closer at the wound, curious, Nurse Voight washes up and brings back a tray of tools. 

“This’ll probably hurt,” she says, lifting a pair of forceps and sliding them into the open wound. It does, a nauseating twist clenching in her stomach at the sharp probing. Steve forces herself to breathe, in, out. A twist of the forceps pulls something deep inside of her, and she can’t help but gasp; Bucky’s hand comes to grip her shoulder. Carefully, Nurse Voight stills her hand and leans closer, peering into the wound and taking a couple of sniffs of the air near it. Shaking her head, she lifts the forceps out. “You’ve already started to heal,” she says, bloody forceps held in the air beside her. “That’s extraordinary. But unfortunate.” 

“What do you mean?” Bucky asks.

“I’d likely do more damage trying to get it out,” Nurse Voight says. “The muscle has already re-formed around it.” Turning, she drops the forceps onto the tray and picks up instead a needle and suture.

“You’re gonna _leave_ it in there?” Bucky says, something familiar and indignant in her tone. 

Nurse Voight nods. “Plenty of soldiers come out of here with a little extra metal,” she says to Steve. “Near as I can tell, it’s clear of your intestines, snuggled up next to your ovary. Even if it shifts, you’ve got a spare one of those.” She gives a little shrug, threading her needle. “If this were a real hospital, maybe. But here —”

“It’s fine,” Steve says. So far, all of her injuries have healed up without scars, her flesh unmarked from head to toe. She wonders if it will feel different, to know she does carry with her a reminder of this war, years in the future. 

If she gets that far.

Bucky’s grip on her shoulder tightens a little, and when Steve glances up, she’s looking not at Steve’s face but at Nurse Voight’s hands, piercing the fresh-pink flesh around the wound. She draws it closed with a few stitches, ties them off and covers them with a bandage. “Now let’s look at that leg, too.”

When Steve gets her suit off, though, and Nurse Voight cleans away the dried blood on her thigh, the skin underneath is shiny-pink, like a weeks-old scar.

“Wow,” Nurse Voight says. She pokes at the edge of the scar with one finger; it gives but doesn’t pull apart. 

Peggy laughs a little at the fascinated expression on Nurse Jefferson’s face. “Remarkable, isn’t she?” 

The fondness in her voice heats Steve right through, but it’s washed over by the disgruntled annoyance to Bucky’s, “Ridiculous, more like.” Her grip on Steve’s shoulder hasn’t loosened, and Steve’s no longer sure if it’s out of anger, fear, or something else entirely.

++

Peggy very pointedly rejects Steve’s offer to help clear up the Hydra camp, telling her to settle herself down and heal. “I expect it will take you an hour,” she says, with a wry smile. “Maybe two.”

Colonel Phillips decides to station the team’s tents concentrically around the periphery of the camp. Even with Steve’s injury, they’re stronger, fresher, and can take longer watches and act as a first line of defense while the rest of the battalion recovers some. She thinks Bucky might bunk down with Gabe, like she sometimes does when they’re around other soldiers, but Bucky follows her to a clearing just behind the trench line, in view of the road, and helps her set up the tent. They go slow, Steve’s body sluggish, as though her cells have realized they’re safe to redirect energy toward healing, and Bucky is real quiet as they pound stakes and tie support lines.

Inside the tent, they roll out their bedrolls parallel, nearly touching, and tuck their packs into the corners. Steve pulls her suit down off her shoulders, tries to get a look at the rip in the abdomen. Bucky sits on her roll cross-legged and looks at Steve. “You gonna tell me what the fuck you were thinking?” she says.

“I’m fine,” Steve says. Bucky’s eyes on her pierce; she turns away to rummage in her pack for the sewing kit. The holes in her suit will require some careful patching, especially after Bucky’s panicked tearing. 

“You got shot,” Bucky says. 

“I’m _fine_ ,” Steve says again. There’s a rustling behind her, then Bucky grabs her ankle and jerks, tugging Steve off balance. She throws her arms out, catching herself, but Bucky twists her grip and drags Steve down in a heap on top of her pack, so Bucky ends up half-crouched beside her. “Fuck’s sake, Bucky, what the hell?”

In answer, Bucky jabs one knee into Steve’s thigh, like they were kids fighting on the floor of the living room again. Steve kicks back at her, shoving herself up off the pack and scrambling to sit up. She can’t quite help a little wheeze of pain as she twists.

Bucky immediately sits back, pulls her feet up, putting space between them. “Sure,” she says, bitterly. “I can see you’re fine.”

“Buck —” Steve reaches for her; Bucky draws away. With a sigh, Steve sits back, lifting her shirt enough to show her the bandage. It’s clean, still, no blood spilled through, and there’s only a bit of bruising showing around its edges, gone yellow already. “See?” she says. “It’s nearly healed.”

“You were _shot_ ,” Bucky says again.

“It’s a war,” Steve says. “That’s just — it happens. I’ll be okay in the morning.” She tugs the bandage back into place, brings her shirt down. The cold whistle of the wind outside rattles the canvas of their tent, and she can see the shiver that passes through Bucky’s shoulders, even hunched up in her coat. She wants to reach out, to draw her close, but Bucky glares at her, sparking anger, not just annoyed, so Steve keeps her hands folded in her lap.

“That’s not — Steve, you’re not fucking invincible.”

“I know,” Steve says, looking down at her hands. She figures she must not be: she feels pain, weakness, hunger. The thing is, though, she’s spent so much of her life knowing that a breeze kicking up the wrong way could be her death, and it’s the most unexpected kind of freedom to not have to remind herself to be scared. 

Bucky reaches over and smacks her, hard, on the leg. The uninjured one, Steve notes, though the shrapnel wound should be little more than a fading scar by now. “Listen to me!” Steve looks up; it’s almost too much to catch Bucky square in the eyes, and she suddenly wonders when they last caught each other like that, raw and unhidden. “You don’t get to do that, just run into danger like that. We’re a team, you and me — and, and everyone. You don’t get to just — decide, like that, that your safety doesn’t matter.”

“I’m the captain, Buck. It’s kinda my job.”

“No it isn’t,” Bucky says, gripping hard at Steve’s knee. “It isn’t. You gotta watch out for your life, too, just as much as you — as you do for us.”

Steve draws in a tight breath, through her mouth. “What do you think I’m doing?” she says. “If you died — if you — that’d be it for me. I’m not saving myself if I can’t save you too.” 

She was never supposed to outlive Bucky anyway; there’s a part of her that thinks she was put here to love Bucky and to hurt her. By leaving, by dying. She’s thought so for a long time, through fever-addled prayers and good days together, through any number of fights on both sides of this war. Bucky never lets her say it. She tried once, when they moved into their little apartment, alone but for each other: _if I die_ , she’d said, _if I die_ — like Ma, she hadn’t said, that loss too close to her skin to speak — _will you be able to keep it by yourself?_ She couldn’t stand the thought of leaving Bucky alone and ripped away from this freedom she needed so much. 

_Shut up, don’t say that,_ Bucky had said. _You’re worried about the rent? Steve, you’re not going anywhere._

_Don’t say that._ She couldn’t bear to hear it from Steve’s mouth, so Steve stopped saying it. 

Now, here, Bucky looks at her like she’s lost her head. “You think you’re the only one?” Bucky says. Her hands clutch hard on her own knees, like she’s trying not to grasp Steve.

“I — I made promises,” Steve says, a little miserably. They haven’t had any letters from Bucky’s family in months, this far from safe Allied territory, but all those that got through carried with them a reminder, even if not in words. _Bring her home safe._

“You think you’re the only one?” Bucky says again, more harshly. For a long moment, the tent is silent but for their twin ragged breath. 

“Bucky,” Steve says, finally, her voice scratching raw and desperate through her throat. Bucky just shakes her head, wearily at first, then harder. 

“Don’t,” she says. “I’ve heard it before. Bucky, I had to. Bucky, it was the right thing to do.” Her sing-song tone holds a biting edge of bitterness.

Steve doesn’t deny it. Shrugs her shoulders, says, “You always patched me up.” Never mind the times Bucky was right there with her.

Exhaling, Bucky looks away, up at the peak of the tent. “Let me see it,” she says, finally. Steve doesn’t move, looks at her. “Fuck,” Bucky says, clearly annoyed, and gets up on her knees, shuffles closer toward Steve. Pushing Steve’s knees open, Bucky settles between them and starts to shove Steve’s shirts up, exposing the wide white bandage wrapping around her abdomen. Steve sits back, weight on her hands, lets Bucky tug loose the tail of the bandage and unwind it.

Below, the wound is nearly knitted together, vivid pink under the spiky black thread of Nurse Voight’s stitches. Bucky presses her palm up against it, cupped around the rise of Steve’s hipbone, gentle at first, then harder. Underneath her hand, Steve can just feel the shift of the bullet, caught up in the tangle of her healing muscles, deep below her skin. She breathes in, sharply; Bucky looks at her. Without lifting her hand, Bucky leans in, brings their mouths together. 

At first, Bucky kisses her somberly, without hunger. Their mouths pressed together, rote and reassuring. Then she curls her fingers in, digging hard into the flesh at Steve’s hip, and bites at her lower lip, and pushes at Steve until Steve shoves back, bringing her hand up to grasp at Bucky’s neck. Her hair has grown long; the tips of it curl between Steve’s fingers, greasy. Pressing all her weight against Steve, Bucky reaches behind her and grabs Steve’s wrist, overbalancing them so they topple onto the ground. 

Drawing back enough to get her hand under the rise of Steve’s collar, Bucky yanks it aside, bites at the curve of her neck. At the sharp sting, Steve gasps aloud; Bucky bites her again. She paws at the buttons of Steve’s shirt with one hand, fumbling them open before pulling away enough to shove it down off her shoulders. It gets bound up on the cuffs, binding Steve’s hands behind her for a long moment while she struggles out of it. Bucky rolls back on her heels, away, and Steve leans forward, following, before she realizes Bucky’s tugging the cuffs of Steve’s suit up, to get at her boots. Sitting up, Steve peels her undershirt off, tossing it to the side, then shrugs out of her threadbare bra. The chill air bites into her skin. At her feet, Bucky jerks at her bootlaces, yanking Steve’s boots off then pulling at the cuffs of her suit. Lifting up, Steve helps shove the suit off, then her long johns, until she’s sprawled across their bedrolls in her panties, one knee gracelessly bent up, leaning on her elbows.

Bucky, sitting back on her heels and breathing hard, looks at her. Steve takes shallow breaths, feels the burn of healing muscles twist with the ache coming from between her legs. With only a knees-breadth space between them, Steve feels like the mortar-driven chasm has just blasted them apart again. Like she’s not sure if Bucky’s on the other side of the void and the dust. “There wasn’t another option,” she says, thinking about choking in grit and shoving forward in heedless panic.

“There’s always —” Bucky starts, and Steve says, “No. Sometimes there isn’t.”

Bucky grits her teeth, obstinate. This one thing they’ve never agreed on. Bucky’s not a coward — god, Bucky’s about the furthest thing from a coward Steve can think of — but Bucky’s walked away from fights aplenty. Talked her way out, tricked her way out, hell, even flirted her way out on occasion, and sometimes just up and walked away. Steve’s not sure she herself ever has, not once she’s started, and she knows well enough that Bucky’s spent half her life trying to teach her how not to fight. 

Letting out her breath, forcefully, Bucky rocks forward on her knees again, plants her hands on Steve’s thighs. One lands just above the healing shrapnel wound, ball of her palm digging in near its borders. “That’s not how it works, not out here,” she says. Her mouth is close to Steve’s, her voice a harsh, controlled whisper. She digs her fingernails into the flesh of Steve’s thighs, and Steve barely holds back her gasp. “You don’t get to fucking —” she cuts herself off, pulls one hand away, slaps Steve hard, in the meaty part of her outer thigh. 

Steve jerks back. “What the hell —” she starts before Bucky crowds in on her, shoves their mouths together. Straddling Steve’s thigh, she bites hard at her lower lip, her cheek, her jaw. At the hard, blood-edged press of her teeth against Steve’s neck, something inside Steve cracks open, and she chokes out a sob. 

“I’m so fucking angry at you,” Bucky says, against her neck. She shoves her thigh forward, and Steve gasps as it rocks against her. She’s wet, panties sticking to her and dragging against the wool of Bucky’s trousers, and she rocks her hips up, clutching at Bucky’s thigh.

“I had to,” she says, hoarse. Her eyes prickle; her chest aches. “I had to, I —” Bucky’s hand on her hip flexes, clutching like she’s testing the strength of her grip. “You can,” Steve says, “you can be — you don’t have to be gentle.” She doesn’t want her to be gentle. Drawing her hand back, Bucky slaps her hard again, on her thigh. It stings, but only for a moment. Her flesh pinks up, just a little; they both watch the blush fade. “I thought you were —” Steve licks her lips. Bucky draws the blunt tips of her nails down Steve’s thigh. 

“I wasn’t,” she said. “And if I do, you gotta —” She looks hard at Steve, right in the eyes, lifts her hand like she might slap her again. Instead, she grips hard, just at the joining of her shoulder, thumb pressed to the hollow of her neck.

“We’re going in circles,” Steve says, miserably. 

“Guess we better both stay alive,” Bucky says, surging forward to kiss her again, hand pressing hard on the edge of her throat so Steve gasps, breathlessly, into her mouth. Bucky rocks up into her again, up on her knees so Steve has to crane her neck back to keep kissing her. She shoves against Steve like she wants to take her over, like she wants to topple her down. Steve holds steady, arches her neck back, presses her throat up into the fierce point of Bucky’s thumb. 

Wrenching her mouth away, Bucky twists her free hand into the knot of hair at the base of Steve’s neck, yanks. It smarts; Steve’s mouth drops open. “You do something like that again, and I’ll —” Bucky tugs again, Steve a taut thread between her two hands. Her throat aches, breath coming shallower; Bucky’s thumb presses on her carotid. 

“Yeah —” Steve gasps out, not an agreement, but something baser, and Bucky snarls, lifts her thumb away. Just as the blood rushes up back to Steve’s head, potent, Bucky slaps her, right across the cheek. Her mouth drops open; her cheek stings. Above her, Bucky takes shallow, shaking breaths, and her hand on Steve’s hair loosens. Steve’s never felt so tender for her, a heart-touched ache all through her chest at the sight of her trembling mouth and dark, wide-shocked eyes. She wants to promise her, wants to kiss the word _yes_ into her mouth again and again, doesn’t want to die. 

“I’ll try,” she says instead. “And you —” Bucky stares at her for one long moment, like she’s said something impossible.

Bucky blinks, her shoulders drop. “Yeah,” she says, dropping down like something pulled tight in her has snapped. She lands so she’s sagged against Steve’s chest with her mouth behind Steve’s ear and her hands limp and open at their sides. Drawing her arms up, Steve enfolds her close. Petting down the bare skin at the back of her neck, Steve kisses Bucky’s temple. The exhausted weight of her body slumps against Steve’s, fight gone out of her. Steve drags them both down, and they shift and shuffle into their bedrolls. Bucky doesn’t say anything else, just tucks in close until they’re pressed together, Steve on her back and Bucky on her stomach, one arm thrown out so it crosses over Steve’s abdomen, a few inches above her wound. Steve turns her chin, kisses the top of Bucky’s head. Makes her no promises.


	14. Chapter 14

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Steve’s mouth softens, a little sigh escaping; for one long moment Bucky lets herself believe in that: that they’ll get out of here, that they’ll settle right back in, mostly unchanged, that they’ll shove their beds together and curl tight around one another in the safe protection of four real walls.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Content warning: this chapter contains more graphic descriptions of the aftermath of violence than previous chapters, as well as mentions of the Holocaust.

_January 1945, outside of Stalingrad_

The weather breaks, giving them a wide-open week starting around the new year where the skies are cold and blue, and though the snow doesn’t melt, the respite leaves the camp enough time to shovel egress points, to build up barricades. To throw snowballs and gather some joy back about them, at least for a moment. With supply lines open, a couple of battalions trek the Hydra prisoners out, to deposit in some hinterland with the Russians, and the US 64th rumbles in with a line of trucks filled with rations. 

It brings with it, too, newspapers and reports, second- and third-hand, of killing camps just across the border. The Jewish people of Poland, of Germany, France, Austria, Czechoslovakia, everywhere else touched by the long reach of the Nazis, gone. Dead. Murdered.

Bucky makes it five lines into an article in a weeks-old New York Times and wants to vomit. To go home. She makes herself keep reading, hiding in a rare quiet corner of the barracks tent, and by the time she reaches the end her hands tremble enough to tear the paper. Her eyes ache; with tears, she thinks, though they don’t spill over. Her parents are safe, her sisters, of course, and they have no family left anywhere east of Brooklyn, but she hasn’t heard from them in months, letters held up somewhere as the team makes its way across and around occupied Europe. She wonders if they know yet; she wants to be home, to go to synagogue, to hold her Ma close and tight and wish for a different world. 

It might be half a day she stays there, or longer, or less. She reads the Times cover-to-cover, seeking out every mention of the camps in between the other news of the day, and then moves to the London Times. People must come and go, but she doesn’t notice anyone until there’s a hand on her shoulder and Gabe saying her name. 

“Buck? Hey — we’ve been looking for you.” Her eyes swim when she looks up, and it takes a moment to focus on his face, creased with worry. Jim’s behind him, looking wan. 

“Did you read all of it?” Jim asks. She nods; it takes effort. “You don’t still have family over here, do you?”

“No,” she says, then clears her voice when it comes out ragged. “No.”

“Okay,” Gabe says, clearly at least a little relieved. “They’re not letting us do anything, not right now.” She blinks as his words fall into place. He means do what they do: find some Nazis, capture them or kill them. She hadn’t even — thought.

“Do you want to get very drunk with us?” Jim says, lifting up a bottle of vodka. She makes room on the bench.

“Letters are going out again,” Gabe says, passing the bottle to her after taking a swig. It burns going down; any alcohol they’ve been able to get their hands on is the same, indeterminate moonshine with a raw, blazing taste. “If you wanna write home.” 

“Yeah,” she says. She’s got a pile of letters to be sent already, written in the downtime over the past few weeks. 

“D’you think,” Jim starts, then stops, looking down at his hands. When Gabe looks at him, there’s ache written in every line of his body, like he knows what Jim will say and wishes he could spare him the thought. “Will they do it back home. Has it — and we’ve just not heard —”

“Fuck,” Bucky spits out, and then, “Jesus, fuck, I didn’t — Jim —” Letters from Jim’s family come even less frequently, and censored so heavily they’re nearly impossible to read. No one in the army talks about the camps unless it’s to shout slurs in the direction of Jim and other fellas that look like him, and it’s more than enough to make Bucky wonder if they shouldn’t be at home fighting their own government. 

“I want to say no,” Gabe says, “but —” he shrugs his shoulders up, miserably, and clutches one hand to Jim’s knee. Jim stares at it, like he doesn’t quite know how to respond, then curls his fingers around Gabe’s palm, holding his hand tight. Bucky glances at his face long enough to see tears spilling over, and then away. She can hear Jim swallow tightly, then cough. He doesn’t say anything else, but sits up a little straighter, and nudges Gabe, who looks back over at Bucky.

“Some of the reports said —” Gabe glances at Jim before continuing; on any day but today she’d resent him being so gentle, but she’s too exhausted to care. “Some said things about medical experiments,” he says. “We wanted to — fuck —” scrubbing one hand over his eyes, Gabe swallows hard. “How are you — with what Zola —”

It’s the first time she’s heard his name in months. The Red Skull is the real target — the real power — and so it seems that for HQ Zola’s whereabouts are incidental. Her chest hurts, suddenly too tight, and she can’t respond. When her breath escapes, it’s in a wheeze, and she leans forward, dropping her head between her arms.

“Fuck,” Jim says, shuffling close enough to reach one hand out, tentatively, and touch her elbow. It’s ridiculous enough that she huffs out something close to a sob, close to a laugh, and bats it away. Sitting up, she breathes in, out, flexes her palms against her knees.

“He didn’t care that I’m Jewish,” she says, finally. “Or —” she shakes his head, not sure how to put into words the way he’d watched her, his close fastidious attention. He did care, but it wasn’t hate. “He called me the lying soldier.” She hasn’t told that to anyone, not to Steve, has not put it down in any official report. He’d wanted her to live, very badly; she has no idea if he treated any of the other men that way, the men he killed, but she saw his face across the gangway after Steve found her. 

Delight. Not of desire but of — affinity. 

She wishes she could vomit. Wishes her body would purge itself of everything, turn itself inside out, begin anew. 

“He liked that you were different,” Gabe says, and it’s close enough to the truth that she nods. 

“I don’t know what to do with that,” she says, feeling more honest than she has in weeks — months. “I don’t know why I lived.” Why she’s alive right now, when she so easily could not be. Against her chest, her tags nestle warmly, missing their H. “I don’t know — I don’t — I don’t know how he changed me,” she chokes out, finally, words she hasn’t been able to say to anyone, and doesn’t look up. If there’s disgust in their faces, she doesn’t want to see it.

Gabe’s arm comes around her shoulder, and she could cry, could curl up under it forever, getting snot on his sleeve. “You’re not so bad,” he says, making her laugh. 

“Besides,” Jim adds, as she straightens and shakes Gabe’s arm off, wipes at her face, “you’ve got Cap. No one could turn evil with Cap around. Not with that much righteousness in the air.” The truth of it is enough to send Bucky back into half-sobbing laughter. She reaches for the bottle and takes another swig, letting the sharp burn remind her that she’s still alive.

++

She’s not the only Jewish guy there, of course; over the next couple of days they find one another, build up a little network that, right now, can do little more than share news. More than one of them are ready to storm out right that very minute and find some Nazis to kill, but US Army higher-ups have sent word to hold the lines and await further instructions.

Luckily enough for Bucky’s team, though, the SSR operates under its own control. Colonel Phillips seems keen to make use of the particular skill set their team brings, so they spend most of the month sortieing out on their own, sweeping up any straggling Hydra troops in the surrounding countryside and occasionally blowing things up. In the field, Steve gives them an unusual amount of latitude to push themselves, not towards cruelty but tipping in the direction of fierce efficiency. Bucky thinks each day of Jim’s comment; in the righteous blaze of Steve’s eyes she finds comfort.

After their daring and heroic rescue, they’re never without company in the camp; when the supply trucks come in, at least a dozen different officers smuggle booze to Steve. Phillips and Carter both have admonished the team to be discreet about fraternizing, what with the near-absolute inter-governmental secrecy nominally ascribed to their team. But Steve does stand out, and word tends to get around.

“They’re wooing you,” Bucky says, swinging one leg over the bench to sit across from Steve in the mess. Steve’s got a fork in one hand and a pen in the other, getting in a bit of supper while she writes her latest report. At her elbow there’s an unopened bottle of port; Bucky picks it up and makes a show of examining the label. 

Steve makes a face. “I keep telling them it doesn’t do anything for me. I think they think I’m being demure.” 

Bucky snorts. “Well, don’t — the fellas are in heaven. Dum Dum proposed marriage when I brought him that bourbon. Down on a knee and everything.” She digs into her green beans; the whole camp is on B rations, and Bucky’s still happy to savor the taste of a real canned vegetable. With the field kitchen open and stocked, too, Steve’s actually eating somewhere near what her body needs — her tray is almost picked clean, and there’s a bright, healthy flush to her cheeks. 

“Should I be jealous?” Steve says, lifting her pen away from the paper. She looks at Bucky with her chin tilted sideways, up from under her lashes, and Bucky wants to kick her under the table, wants to haul her right over it and kiss her hard. With the breaking of the siege, too, something like regulation conditions have fallen once more upon the camp, which means that for four weeks now Steve’s been bunking down in an officer’s tent with Carter, and Bucky’s with the men. 

Bucky licks her mouth; Steve’s eyes track the movement. “Maybe,” she says. “I got a sweetheart who I don’t hardly see anymore. Makes the eyes wander.” She shrugs up one shoulder, eyes wide and guileless, and Steve kicks her ankle under the table.

“Punk,” she says. “You’re seeing me right now.” Bucky starts to waggle her eyebrows, but Steve starts to laugh before she can say anything anyway. “I know,” Steve says, fondly. “Me too.” It’s enough, for the moment. They won’t be here forever; it’s only gotta be a matter of time before Phillips sends them back out into the field. 

Steve regards her for a long moment, setting down her fork so she can reach across the table and just touch the back of Bucky’s hand. Something inside Bucky wants to soften, to go sweet and limp and get rid from the taut strain that runs right up and down her spine. Steve draws her hand back just in time. 

It’s not just being away from Steve that aches, it’s every line of her body drawn tight every minute of the day. She’d grown used, in nearly a year of time spent primarily in the field, to letting her body settle in. Not guarding herself so closely. Since they formed this team, they’ve not spent more than a week or two at a base nor more than a couple weeks with other teams, and it’s caught her up sharp, the need to be Sergeant James Barnes again, all the time. 

With the team, in the field, she’s Sarge, she’s Bucky, she’s — who she is. 

Across the table, Steve looks at her with a wry sort of grimace. Bucky wants to ask her how she’s holding up, too; being Agent Rogers seems to be easy for her, when they’re in briefings, but as a woman at the head of a mysterious combat team, building up to be something of a legend across the camp, she’s much more ill at ease. Right now, though, there are men all up and down the tables near them, tossing occasional gawking glances their way, and they both of them must shield their shoulders, watch their words. 

“Let me see this,” Bucky says, pilfering the top page of Steve’s report. Fishing a pen out of her pocket, she settles in to annotate Steve’s words with her own impressions, as has become their habit. 

They’re nearly finished with the report when Dum Dum shoves Bucky over to sit on the bench next to her and tosses a pile of envelopes on the table. Bucky’s ready to shove him back when the inky writing on the front of the airmail paper catches her eye. Her hands spasm as something like a sob wells up in her throat; before she can reach her hands forward, Steve’s shuffling through the haphazard pile, pushing some of them at Bucky. 

Half-a-dozen of them: _Sergeant James Barnes, 107th Infantry Regiment_ in her Ma’s handwriting. She’d know it anywhere, knows it now even though it’s been months — months — since she’s seen a new letter, months since the mail’s caught up to them. Steve has a stack just the same, she sees, a couple in Ma’s writing and a few unfamiliar. 

“There was a bag just for us,” Dum Dum says. “Since the last time we were at HQ.” 

“Routed through the USO,” Steve says, peering at the smeared date of the postmark. Bucky’s family doesn’t know that Steve’s there with her, doesn’t know that Bucky’s not technically with the 107th anymore. 

“We were also in the forest for a couple months there,” Bucky says, wondering if she’ll cry if she opens them up right there. Shouldn’t risk it, she thinks.

Steve must think the same, for she shoves back from the bench, hurriedly gathering her report and the letters in one hand, her cleared tray in the other. “You wanna —” she says, and Bucky’s nodding before she even finishes.

“Thanks,” she says, clapping Dum Dum’s shoulder as she stands. He nods, sliding the tray that she hasn’t quite finished in front of him.

Bucky’s already ripping open the oldest envelope by the time they get back to Steve’s tent, fishing out the thin airmail paper. All she sees is her Ma’s handwriting on _My dear Bucky_ , before her eyes are swimming. She rubs at them, ineffectually, with the back of one fist while Steve nudges her inside the tent and toward one of the cots. 

The words are upbeat and cheerful, commentary on Dad’s creative approaches to rationing at the store, gossip about the ladies at synagogue, praise for the girls and their hard work toward the war effort. Yet, Bucky’s sure she’s not imagining the heartsore yearn under the words, the ache of her Ma’s love; she feels it herself, in the tender pang of something deeper than homesickness. Next to her, Steve sniffles and looks at her with glassy, shining eyes. 

“Susanna’s a mechanic,” Bucky says, voice choked up. Steve nods, vigorously, gesturing with her own letter.

“Aggie’s leading her own stage show,” Steve says. Bucky’s heard so many stories about Steve’s U.S.O. friends that they feel like her own; she tries to picture Aggie, remembering a bright grin and huge, sweeping victory rolls from the couple of snapshots Steve carries with her. “She and Bess have left the troop and get this — they’ve got themselves a little place in Brooklyn! Just a coupla blocks from ours.” Her gaze goes tender as she looks back down at the letter. Rebecca’s taken the apartment over with another girl who works in the office next door to hers, but it could be theirs again. Steve’s mouth softens, a little sigh escaping; for one long moment Bucky lets herself believe in that: that they’ll get out of here, that they’ll settle right back in, mostly unchanged, that they’ll shove their beds together and curl tight around one another in the safe protection of four real walls. 

The flap to the tent rustles open. Rushing in, Peggy doesn’t bother to be surprised to see Bucky or chagrined to be interrupting. “I need you both,” she says. “Howard’s here, and he has news.”

++

Stark looks awful. His hair, perfectly coiffed the few times Bucky’s met him, has overgrown his collar and hangs, greasily, against his temples. His tie is askew and his shirt-front rumpled; the bags under his eyes suggest he hasn’t slept recently. He’s pacing as they step inside the tent, words pouring out of him frantically.

“— we need to go right away, if they’re already manufacturing — and at who knows what scale, there are factories there that have been left empty, Hydra could easily —” Phillips’s eyes are tight, tired, as he watches Stark pace. He looks like he’s struggling to follow Stark’s rapid sentences. 

“Howard,” Peggy says firmly, placing one hand on his elbow. He turns, startled; his shoulders visibly release when he sees her standing there with Steve and Bucky. “Can we start from the beginning?”

If Stark notices he’s being handled, he doesn’t show it; instead, he nods jerkily to Peggy. “I came across reports of deaths in Poland — clusters of them, each group a few days apart, with the same signs of significant brutality.” He takes a breath; his eyes skitter over to Steve and then away, downward. He’s never quite been easy around Steve, Bucky’s noticed, but right now he can barely look at her.

“It’s wartime, Stark. How do you know it’s not garden variety war crimes?” Phillips asks.

Stark shakes his head. “I don’t, not for sure. But I think they — someone, Hydra, the Russians, some rogue psychopath — might be —” he cuts himself off, rubs his mouth, takes another deep breath. “I think the killer, or killers, are operating under chemical influence.” 

“Why do you think that?” Steve says, before Phillips can. Stark just shakes his head again. He doesn’t look anywhere near Steve’s eyes.

“Similarities to an — an incident that I —” He scrubs his hand over his mouth again, miserably. “Look, it’s more classified than any of you have clearance for. Hell, I shouldn’t even know except that I — that it was my —” He stops again, shaken. 

“Howard,” Peggy says, soft but for the flinty edge to her voice, “what did you do?”

“Don’t ask me that, Peggy,” Stark says, a note of pleading creeping into his voice. “I can’t —” 

Steve takes a step forward. “Where do you need us to go?”

Stark lets out a skittering breath and moves behinds Phillips’s desk to the map of the area hanging from the canvas wall. With a pencil, he marks five spots. They make a little circle. “The clusters,” Stark explains. “I think the — chemical — is being made somewhere in the center.” There’s nothing contained within the little circle, no town big enough to warrant the attention of cartographers. 

“Survivors?” Bucky asks, working out what their supply packs will need to look like. Three, four days’ march from here, well below freezing and a good chance of snow. 

“Not likely,” Stark says grimly. 

Peggy looks angrier than Bucky’s ever seen her, lips thin and arms crossed tightly over her chest. “Liquid? Gas?”

“Aerosolized liquid,” Stark says.

“Can it be contained?”

He shakes his head, looks at Steve. “Burn it. Whatever you find — bodies, lab equipment. And wear gas masks — do you still have those prototypes?” he asks Peggy. She shakes her head. “I’ll rig something up. You can’t — if someone’s successfully replicated it, you can’t breathe it it. You _can’t_.” 

Stark’s face is sallow, waxen. Bucky glances between him and Steve, whose jaw is gritted tight. “Howard,” she says. “We need to know what you know. I’m not taking my men out there —” 

It works, well enough. Stark might be an egocentric asshole, but Bucky knows that over many strategy sessions and tech meetings he’s grown fond enough of the team. He and Jacques get along somewhat terrifyingly, in fact, given how often their encounters feature large amounts of explosives. Glancing at the flap of the tent, Stark swallows and says, “If they were successful — if you breathe it in, or come into skin contact with the liquid chemical, you’ll go into an intense rage. Uncontrollable, violent.” He pauses, scrubs his hand across his mouth. “Don’t breathe it in, for god’s sake.”

++

It takes three days on foot to reach the region of the initial deaths, and they don’t see a single living soul, human or beast, the entire time. In the evenings, the crackle of the fire and the panting of their breath are the only sounds to break the air. By the second day they’ve started singing on march, heedless of any consequences: upbeat numbers from the radio three years ago, bawdy bar songs, even silly ditties from their respective childhoods. It keeps the silence from whining in their ears, endless and insistent. They rotate watch, as usual, at night, though Bucky’s not sure any of them really sleep. 

On the third day, Jim and Gabe consult the map as they get closer to where the center must be. Approaching from the south, they figure they’ll skirt around the major death sites noted by Stark and try to find the locus, wherever the chemical’s being manufactured. It’s a wanderer’s game now; they’ll crosshatch over the terrain, taking it in quadrants until something turns up. 

A few hours in, they crest a ridge and see the first sign of human habitation in days: a ramshackle one room house, still and silent. As they make their way down the hill, their footprints are the first to disturb the blanketing snowfall, crisp loud crunches as each step breaks the frozen crust. 

At the bottom of the hill, Steve signals them to stop. The shack is silent and cold, no sign of life anywhere, but Stark was very clear about the potential risk. Wordlessly, they each pull out their gas masks. The strap of Bucky’s is snug, and takes some fumbling to pull over the back of her head. She moves her hand away and it snaps into place, holding her tight — holding — holding her down, against the table, immobile —

Ripping the mask away from her face, she heaves a breath. It drops to the ground. She’s in Poland; the air is thin in her lungs; her wrists are free. He’s not there; he can’t touch her.

Something touches her shoulder; Bucky jerks away.

“Bucky?” Steve’s voice, muffled. Bucky blinks. Looks up. Behind large, round goggles Steve’s eyes are wide, concerned. Bucky takes a breath. They’re in Poland, on a mission, and there might be gas. 

“Fine,” Bucky says. Her voice comes out raw, so she swallows, says it again. “I’m fine. Strap was too tight and it just — I’m fine.” Bending, she picks up her mask, avoiding Steve’s eye by watching, intently, her own fumbling fingers as she loosens the strap. Steve waits for her to secure it before moving them out.

Steve takes the front and Bucky the rear, Springfield tucked against her side and ready. The gas mask reeks of vulcanized rubber and with each breath her chest aches, but she forces her attention away, to the soft sounds of their footsteps against dead, ice-crisp grass under snow, to the dry cold gleam of the sun.

Steve knocks on the door of the house, two quick, solicitous raps like she’s coming by for tea. The crack of her knuckles against wood sounds loudly in the empty air. In front of Bucky, Dum Dum shifts his weight nervously. Nothing happens.

The door lacks a knob, instead bearing a frayed lump of rope emerging through a hole in its center. It opens easily under Steve’s nudge.

Bucky waits, eyes scanning the hills around them, while Steve and Jacques step inside.

“Fucking creepy,” Dum Dum says, voice mask-muffled. Bucky doesn’t look at him, but nods her agreement. Something primal inside her screams to leave, sending the hairs on the back of her neck rigid in warning.

After a too-long minute, Jacques then Steve emerge from the house. The shield remains on Steve’s back; she wrings her hands together before bringing them to her face and lifting the mask away. The rest of them follow, happy enough to have the stinking rubber off. 

“Looks like Howard’s right,” Steve says grimly. “They —” she looks down at the mask, tubing nearly crushed from the clenching of her fists. “I would have thought a bear, or — but —”

“The blood,” Jacques cuts in. “On the man’s hands. His mouth.” Bucky’s stomach twists. 

“Ground’s too hard to bury them,” Gabe says.

Steve shakes her head. “We burn it. Howard said — burn everything.”

It takes the damp wood a while to catch fire, but soon enough kerosene-bright flames lick up the walls. By the time the roof collapses into the interior, the sweet reek of burning human flesh coats Bucky’s throat, thick enough to gag. Like so many other abominations, the smell has grown familiar. They shift their packs up and get moving again.

They march until the twilight sky is grey and colorless. When they finally stop, everyone drops their packs in silence, not making eye contact. Steve sets to making a fire, kicking out a clear spot in the snow, and the rest of them fall away to the rest of the necessary tasks, comfortingly rote. Dig in, make camp, eat, sleep. The inside of Bucky’s mouth feels coated in ash and bile; she’s not sure if she can swallow a bite. By the time she’s finished hoisting up their tent, Steve’s got a couple of cans of beans heating up; when Bucky sits down next to her, she hands over a packet of crackers that Bucky doesn’t open. 

Steve takes the first watch. When she doesn’t turn in three hours later, Bucky shuffles out of the tent and makes her way to the edge of camp. “Shift’s up,” she says, coming up on Steve’s left. In the dark, she’s barely more than a silhouetted shadow, and Bucky can just see her turn her head. 

“I can stay,” Steve says. “You get some sleep.” Bucky drops her hand to the back of Steve’s neck, where the edge of her woolen cap doesn’t quite cover the nape of her neck, hair swept up and tucked away. 

“You gotta sleep too, pal.” Steve leans into Bucky’s hand briefly before straightening. 

“Mind’s going,” she says. Bucky’s heard that a million times before, anytime Steve couldn’t sleep. Too much happening in her brain to sleep, she’d say. Bucky drops down next to her, on a cleared-off bit of log. 

“Anything in particular,” Bucky says, a wry slant to her voice. Steve catches it, quirks her lips up. 

“Oh, nah,” she says, leaning forward on her elbows. Bucky waits. “Howard was scared,” Steve says, finally. “Really scared — and there’s all this talk about the war wrapping up and I —”

“Not done having fun yet?” Bucky says. She knows what Steve’s getting at; doesn’t want her to say it. 

Steve plays her game, rolling her chin to look sideways at Bucky and saying, lightly, “What do you think home will be like when we get back?”

Bucky considers, curling her cold fingers up inside her mittens. Before this, she’d been preparing herself for so long to let Steve go. Getting ready to watch her find a fella, fall in love, move to an apartment that doesn’t have Bucky’s bloody work clothes drying over the radiator. That’s what she thought she’d come home to when she shipped out: Steve in a new life, hell, maybe Rebecca or Susanna married off, too, her parents a little older and more lined, Miriam a woman and not a girl. She’d find a job again, she’d find a new apartment, she’d be like some of the older butches she sees sometimes in the bars: on their own, grey, a glass of whiskey and a wry smile for the bartender. She’d be alright.

It wasn’t until Steve showed up, ‘til Steve showed up and _stayed_ , that Bucky realized the best home she’d ever known had been Steve, that somewhere beyond all the images she built up, somewhere more instinctive and wanting, the only home she ever wanted to return to was Steve. They’re here, now; she’ll keep following. She’ll get them both home, or neither. 

“D’you think Rebecca will give us our place back,” is what she says. Steve smiles, and they spend the rest of watch talking about the neighbors, about Mrs. Hubert’s bakery, about visiting the Met and sketching together. A life with small pains, without horror. 

When they move out, before the sun rises, Bucky watches the back of Steve’s neck, scrubbed pink with snow, and follows her closely.

++

That day, they find the village, cresting a hill and spying a smattering of houses arranged around a snow-covered common marked by lumpen, indeterminate shapes. Were there any sun to see, it would be high noon. As it is, the settlement spread out in front of them is one shade of toneless grey, untouched day-old snow dull without the glimmer of sunlight. From this distance, the houses are minuscule, toys or game pieces, but as they move closer they start to see the way each one has been damaged: gaping ax holes in walls, doors torn off their hinges and thrown aside, windowsills hacked into unrecognizable pulp. And then, the first body.

Their gas masks are on tight already, and for once Bucky is thankful for the stench of rubber. For the body in front of them has been ripped apart, spine cracked like a Christmas goose and guts ripped out and bursting open. A dusting of snow soaks into the pulp of the body, stained red. What she can see of flesh has blackened already, and all else is covered by an indeterminate sludge of blood, feces, and viscera. They leave it be and walk further.

Soon enough, though, the bodies multiply. Spread across the common in the center of the settlement, bodies pile and entangle, as though they’d expired while ripping each other apart. In the small houses, figures claw at the ground and spew guts over thresholds. In more than one house, the fragmented remains of children stain bedsheets. 

Nothing stirs as they move through the town. At the edge of the common, one house seems more damaged than the rest, one wall ripped away entirely. As they move closer, a glint of metal catches Bucky’s eye; gesturing to the team to fall in behind her, Bucky lifts her Springfield and leads the approach from the side. 

The front door dangles from its hinges, strangely still in the windless air. Stepping over the threshold, Bucky pauses to let her eyes adjust, attuning herself to any movement. There’s nothing, and when her eyes focus, she first sees a tangle of glass tubing, beakers and flasks in a broken heap on a table against the far wall. It feels familiar, important; it tugs at the space at the back of her mind. 

Another step; her foot nudges against something on the ground. She looks down, gaze obscured by the protruding nose of the mask, to see a metal canister roll away from her foot. It makes a tinny clang coming to a stop against a table leg, and in her head she hears shouting in German — 

She wrenches her wrists — they’re tight — something clatters to the ground — her wrists — her mouth, full of bile — his face — the clang of metal against metal — 

Stumbling out of the house, Bucky yanks at her gas mask. She can’t breathe — she can’t — her lungs are tight, chest strapped down to the — the table — to — 

The mask wrenches away from her face, drops away, and she reaches with one hand to steady herself, but touches nothing. Her legs tremble, like something is ripping up through her body from the ground, and she falls to her knees, vomit rising in her throat. Her mouth, her nose, her throat: all fill with the stench of rotting flesh and feces. When she falls to her hands, a sickly stream of vomit splashes from her mouth.

A sound, like a plea — is it from her own throat? Bucky looks to her left in hazy confusion, and at first sees only the brackish muddy brown of days-old blood, streaked across an indeterminate form. She’s outside, her wrists are free, he’s not there.

The sound again, and a movement. Her eyes focus: not a form, but a body. A woman, guts torn out and spilling to one side, viscera dried up and blood soaked into the snow beneath her torso. Her hand moves.

Bucky jerks back, startled, falls on her ass and kicks against the ground to shove away. The hand moves again, and another weak, pleading sound comes from the woman’s mouth. Bucky stares at her, sees her blood-blackened lips tremble. She’s as good as dead; she shouldn’t be alive. Her eyes are unfocused but they stare, blankly and open, toward Bucky. She moans again. 

“Buck —” Steve’s voice. Steve’s voice on her name, worried and scared, and Bucky sitting on the ground afraid of a dead woman and too cowardly to do what’s needed. Steve comes around the corner of the house, kneels down next to Bucky. Her gas mask is shoved up, perched on the top of her head like a grotesque hat, and her eyes worry. 

“I —” Bucky starts, and the woman moans again. Steve’s body tightens to attention immediately before her gaze falls on the heap of a body in front of them.

“Oh —” she breathes out, a pained exhale. Her hand drags away from Bucky’s shoulder as she stands, moves to kneel next to the woman. 

With Steve’s hand placed gently at her throat, the woman seems to summon enough strength to force out actual words. They’re not a language either of them recognizes, but Steve listens, and nods, looking up and down the woman’s eviscerated body. “Yes,” she says, gently. The woman’s voice falls away; Steve places her palms on either side of the woman’s cheeks, like she’s going to embrace her, kiss her forehead, and cranks them sideways, snapping her neck. 

From behind, Steve’s slumped shoulders look small again. She takes two long, slow breaths before shoving to her feet and turning to Bucky. “Gotta get up, Buck,” she says. “We’re going to burn it all.” The lines by Steve’s eyes look deep and heavy, but she holds her hand out to Bucky without shaking. 

++

They pile the bodies around the house, a grotesque bonfire. Bucky’s not the only one who vomits up what’s left in her stomach. All the time, as they lift and move bodies that are little more than ripped-open flesh, as they pour the kerosene and light the matches, as they watch to make sure it all takes, Steve stays quiet. None of them are talking, really, but her silence is different. She’d gone back into the house first, to gather any papers she could find to bring back to Stark, and had emerged with her mouth set in a grim line. Before they pack up to leave, Bucky catches sight of Steve standing, just looking at the burning house, arms crossed and feet apart, silhouetted against the gruesome flames. 

A year ago, signing some papers that transferred her name and allegiance to an agency that won’t, officially, ever claim her back, Bucky had, for just one moment, let herself wonder aloud a small fragment of her worries. She’d caught Agent Carter alone, passing between meetings, and asked her if she had any qualms about putting an untried, untrained woman in charge of her secret elite team. There was, she’s willing to admit, a small, shameful part of her that wanted Carter to reconsider, to send Steve home. Instead, Carter had tilted her head, said mildly, “She can be trained.” Bucky knew that well enough, of course; who’d given Steve her first training, after all? “It’s not just that,” Carter had conceded, after a moment’s needling. It wasn’t a surprise, what she said next: it was only a surprise that someone else had realized it, and that it didn’t seem to terrify Carter the way it did Bucky.

“She knows how to decide what’s right,” Carter had said, “and sticks to it. To her own death, I’d imagine.” She’d said it mildly enough, though Bucky knew, already, that Carter’s fondness for Steve wasn’t trivial. 

Steve turns around. Her face, and hands, and suit are streaked black with blood and — everything else. “Come on,” she says, wearily. “I’d like a little distance before the sun goes down.”

By silent agreement, they don’t stop to make camp until it’s getting too dark to see their own feet in front of them. It still feels too close; the air remains too quiet. They start a fire, but after a queasy moment’s contemplation, Monty hands around a couple of the rock-hard D ration bars instead of cracking open the tins of meat in their ration kits. It’s only Steve’s grimly weary insistence that gets Bucky to shave off a couple of bites of the chalky chocolate bar, with the taste of vomit and death still in her mouth. They’d changed what clothes they could and scrubbed up with snow what they couldn’t, but the lingering stench of the village haunts them. 

“We all need the energy,” Steve says, clearly forcing herself to swallow a few bites, too. 

“They did it to each other,” Dum Dum says, breaking the silence. “Neighbors — their own families.” He sits with his elbows on his knees, head hung low. 

Bucky’s too exhausted to reply, but Jim spits out, “It’s always somebody’s neighbor. Every fucking one of them —” he jerks his hand toward the horizon, encompassing the whole world around them — “they’re all somebody’s neighbor.” He staggers to his feet, looking for a moment like he’s going to throw a punch, but then reaches down for the radio case at his feet. “I’m going to call in,” he says, teeth gritted together, and stomps away to find some clear, higher ground.

For a beat, no one says anything. Gabe crumples the rest of his bar back into the foil and follows Jim. Touching Bucky’s elbow, Steve says, “Walk the perimeter with me?” in a voice too quiet, exhausted.

The moon’s near to full, and Steve’s eyesight is pretty good in the dark these days, so they make their way away from camp easily enough, Bucky half a step behind Steve. Looking at the back of her neck, sweat-dampened braid half-caught in the neckline of her suit, Bucky wonders what kind of luck she might have convincing Steve to sleep all night and let the rest of the fellas take the night’s patrols. Steve’ll swear up and down that she needs less sleep than everyone else, but even she has to break sometime. 

“Back there at the house…” Steve says without turning around. Something twists in Bucky’s stomach, a flash of anger.

“I’m fine,” she says, not answering Steve’s lingering question.

Stopping, Steve turns around. Fully around, so she’s looking Bucky square in the face, glint of the moon falling just so Bucky can see the worried creases around her eyes.

“It’s nothing,” Bucky says, trying to step around her. Steve touches Bucky’s elbow, gently, and the twisting thing in Bucky’s stomach falls to pieces. She slumps forward a little, leaning her shoulder against Steve’s, and lets out a long, shaking breath. 

“Oh, darling,” Steve says, voice tender and aching, as she pulls Bucky against her fiercely. Bucky lets her: feels the misery of her body fall against Steve’s steadfast bulk, feels the hard press of her arms holding Bucky tight, feels battened down, secure. “Tell me?” Steve says, against Bucky’s neck. 

Bucky breathes out, pulls away, kicks the ground bare of snow in a little patch and sits, pulling Steve down next to her. 

“It was the worst thing I’ve ever seen,” Steve says, straightforwardly. That might be true for Bucky, too; the dead linger behind her eyes and on her skin, and she tastes their ashes in her mouth. But she’s seen more battles than Steve, and every massacre holds its own horrors, its ghosts that stay somewhere in the corner of her eye, in the memory of her hands. 

“That wasn’t —” she starts, then stops, starts again. “The — the bodies weren’t why I —” Steve angles her shoulders, looks at Bucky with her chin tilted and, Bucky knows without really looking, her brows drawn tight.

“I wasn’t seeing them,” Bucky says. “Or — not only.” Steve says nothing, just looks, patiently, and it’s annoying enough that Bucky almost stands up and leaves. Instead, though, she forces out a long exhale and says, “The equipment, I think — it was like I was back on the — on _his_ table.” She doesn’t look at Steve; Steve doesn’t touch her. “I’m not cracked,” she says, to Steve’s silence.

“Didn’t say you were,” Steve says, measured. “Has this happened — before?” Bucky looks at her, finally, then away when the concern aching in Steve’s eyes is too much. 

She shakes her head. “Not since that first day,” she says. “After you — on the march back.” She doesn’t say how long she thought she might be dreaming. 

“I didn’t know,” Steve says.

“Nothing you could do about it,” Bucky says, a little bitterly.

“I didn’t mean —”

“I know,” Bucky cuts her off. She doesn’t want to argue, not really. 

Steve leans their shoulders together. “It’s not the same,” she says, “I know it’s not, but. Sometimes I dream — I have these dreams that I get into the chamber, with Howard and Erskine there, and it changes me.”

“No shit,” Bucky says dryly. Steve shoves against her, so she has to catch herself from falling over.

“You _know_ ,” she says, and Bucky does. Sometimes she dreams that she gets up from the table and her face peels away, red and monstrous. Sometimes it’s Steve’s that does. “I asked Peggy why she didn’t — if they were gonna pick a gal anyway, why not her.” Bucky’s thought it, too, those times when her eyes meet Peggy’s looking at Steve. 

“Yeah?”

“She said —” Steve shakes her head, like she can’t quite remember. “I think she was afraid of liking it too much. The killing. I worry that I might —”

“You don’t,” Bucky says, firmly. She’s seen men who like killing, who like the taste of blood in their mouths, who like to cause those last moments of pain. Steve’s nothing like that. 

“Don’t you ever worry —”

“Sure. It’s not the same, though. To like the purpose of it, to — to want it because it’s right. It’s not the same as liking it.”

“Still killing, though,” Steve says, looking down at her wrung-together hands.

Bucky wants to say _it’s war_ , wants to tell Steve that that’s why she’s there, because if she’s there, with her gun and her steady hand Steve doesn’t need to kill at all. After today that’s not true, though, if it ever has been. “Yeah,” she says instead. Steve is changed, and so is she, and it’s not just because of the stuff shoved in their veins. For a long moment, they breathe together, their pressed-close shoulders moving in tandem, when a rustle sounds behind them.

Gabe steps out of the woods, looking apologetic. “Cap, Sarge. Jim got a hold of HQ — there’s news.”

When they get back, everyone’s standing in a tight circle, opening up to let the three of them in wordlessly. Jim’s got the radio half packed-away on the ground, on one knee as he tucks everything back in its case, and by the way everyone shifts and looks at Steve it’s clear he’s been waiting until they return to share what he’s heard.

“New orders from Carter,” Jim says, straightening up. He looks at Bucky rather than Steve, and she doesn’t understand until he says, “In three days Zola’s going to be on a train going through the Alps. We’re going to get him.” He says it like a vow, a promise through anger-gritted teeth, and that more than anything keeps Bucky’s mind tethered at the unsettling sound of his name. She looks down at the ground to the trampled snow. Seven sets of mud-worn boots, circled up. 

Next to her, Gabe lets out a deep-held breath. “The fucking Alps again,” Dum Dum says, with an unbelieving laugh. When she looks up, everyone’s standing a little straighter, shoulders a bit less weary. Monty catches her eye, nods.

Steve’s knuckles knock against hers. “Alright. What’s the plan?”

++

Wind whips up the valley, bitingly chill. It blows tendrils of Steve’s hair across her forehead, into her eyes; she shoves them behind her ears with impatience. “You sure about this, Cap?” Monty says, peering across the valley through binoculars. With the naked eye, the tunnel is minuscule, a dark smudge against the ice-covered mountainside. From it, a narrow curl of track hugs the side of the mountain on a bridge of spindly struts. 

“Yes,” Steve says, quite firmly. No one else asks. Monty and Jacques start to work out the math for launching the zip wire across, the same familiar sort of calculations Bucky works through each time she watches Steve’s back from afar. They don’t need her help, today, though, and soon enough Monty’s shouldering the modified grenade launcher and aiming carefully. There’s a moment of still silence as the spear flies through the air before they hear, distantly then reverberating, the thunk of it landing. Monty pulls on the rope, gently at first then harder, and it holds fast. 

“Hot damn,” Dum Dum says, clapping Monty on the shoulder. “I’m still not going down it, but that was damn fine work.” 

“Chicken,” Gabe says, twanging the rope appraisingly. They’ve already decided that they’ll have enough time for three of them to land: Steve, Bucky, Gabe. The rest will hustle back down the mountain to meet them on the far end of the tunnel, hopefully with Zola neatly trussed up and ready to turn over to the SSR. Bucky’s gut turns over; she tells herself it’s the thought of flying down an Alpine valley on nothing more than a thin rope.

“Willing to admit my own deficiencies,” Dum Dum says. “Never been a fan of carnival rides.”

It’s nothing at all like Coney Island, but the comparison makes Bucky grin despite the cold knot coiled tight in her gut. “Remember when I made you ride the Cyclone?” she says to Steve.

“And I threw up?” Steve says, looking at her sidelong. The barest hint of a smile lurks at the corners of her mouth.

“Not trying to get revenge, are you?” 

Steve lifts one hand up to land on Bucky’s shoulder, palm cupping around the join of her neck. Her thumb rubs against the hollow of Bucky’s throat. In the bright Alpine sun, Steve is pink-cheeked and golden, bright and healthy, and when she smiles her eyes meet Bucky’s brimmed full up with hope, shining and resilient. “Wouldn’t dream of it,” she says, squeezing her hand so that Bucky’s pulse flutters beneath the press of her fingertips. 

Even when she drops her hand away, their shoulders stay pressed close as they look down the precipice together. Far down below, a river rages, too turbulent for ice to form beyond thin wisps of white along its edges. _Just gotta dive in_ , Bucky thinks, a bit raggedly. All goes well, it’ll be like flying, not drowning. “We’ll get him,” Steve says, an undertone, like she’s making a promise.

Steve keeps her promises; Bucky holds onto that. There’s something she wants to say, but she can’t find it. 

Behind them, the radio crackles. “It’s coming up fast,” Jim says, listening to the radio. Brushing the back of her palm against Bucky’s, Steve lifts her hands up to the pulley and awaits Jacques’s signal. “ _Maintenant_ ,” he says, and Steve jumps, and Bucky follows.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you all for coming along on this journey with me, friends. When I started writing this series I always envisioned three stories ending at the train, but I didn't quite imagine how long this third story would be, or that the universe and characters would grip me enough that I'd want to keep going. This is the end for the moment, but very soon there will be a few codas/prequels/interstitial scenes posted, so do make sure to subscribe to the series! I have started on the modern day (Winter Soldier/Avengers) sequel, but currently have no specific idea of if/when those will be completed.
> 
> Thanks again for everyone reading along or reading now that it's complete, and especially those who left such amazing comments all the way through. You're the best!


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